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How you play Spades is how you play life

pudding.cool

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Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#51

Post by dagw »

spullara wrote: post #25
ALittleLight wrote: post #24

There was a line in there that reminded me a bit of a thing you might write in a school essay - "When playing Spades, you’re dealt a hand and have no control over the cards you get—unless you’re cheating." I'm having trouble thinking of a card game where you do get control over the cards you're dealt. Maybe there is one? I'm reminded of a time in high school where for some reason I had to write an essay connecting Ma…

In games like Magic: The Gathering you do get to decide what possible cards you can be dealt.

And richer players have access better to cards that poorer payers can never hope to be dealt.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#52

Post by saghm »

zdw wrote: post #5

I (as a white American) didn't know about this history, and have played Spades as a family game for as long as I can remember. Some interesting variations - we usually played with no Jokers, no bag, but with a negative score rule when not meeting bid. Also, a card selection mechanic if 2 players are playing - the players would alternating picking cards from from the deck, decide whether they wanted it, then keep it a…

Those are the exact rules I learned from my father as well (both of us white Americans)

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#54

Post by riversflow »

ALittleLight wrote: post #24

There was a line in there that reminded me a bit of a thing you might write in a school essay - "When playing Spades, you’re dealt a hand and have no control over the cards you get—unless you’re cheating." I'm having trouble thinking of a card game where you do get control over the cards you're dealt. Maybe there is one? I'm reminded of a time in high school where for some reason I had to write an essay connecting Ma…

I’m gonna chime in here and say that in Cribbage you only “play” 4 of the 6 cards you’re dealt, the two discarded cards from each player become the crib which is counted for points, but not played.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#55

Post by nobody9999 »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #7
cool_dude85 wrote: post #2

Apparently no mention of the variant that, in my experience as a kid, was by far the most common: no bidding, 1 point to the winning team, or 2 if you win 10 books. Commonly, you bet 5 or 10 as a team and won for being first to the amount bet. I played or watched probably thousands of games in middle and high school and I don't think I ever saw anyone play the formal way.

Never heard of that variant myself. Played constantly in high school, mostly during calculus and comp sci; wrote a game engine for it in C++ in that class. Like poker, it's less about the cards and more about the social aspects. Actual card strategy is just table stakes. Can you bluff the other team into bidding too low or high? Can you read how your teammate bids and close the round accordingly? I've won plenty of g…

>The only variant we'd play was a three player game where we'd have to remove a few cards to make the deck size a multiple of 3.

We always just removed the 2 of clubs. 51/3=17 cards each.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#56

Post by Matthias1 »

traceroute66 wrote: post #8

I have to say... what terrible UX ! Scroll right? In a world where literally everyone else scrolls down ? Its completely un-natural if you're not using a tablet or smartphone ! Unless you have one of those fancy mice with the horizontal scroll button, but most people won't and will have to click and drag (rinse and repeat).

I wanted to say the opposite. Obviously, the author made a lot of unconventional design decisions, but they were all very well executed, and felt intuitive for me. For example, there were a couple of places where the graphs used shapes instead of just bars, but I don't think it ever hurt readability, to speak of.

Re: How you play Spades is how you play life

#57

Post by amw-zero »

Chris2048 wrote: post #48
Jtsummers wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the site guidelines: > Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful. Your post and the ensuing thread is a great example of why this made it into the guidelines. An interesting article, but over half the comments are a discussion about the page's fo…

And who defines "interesting"? Mentioning what ratio of comments are traceroute66's has no value either.

The people who wrote the guidelines define what’s interesting.
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