[Kde-games-devel] On KDE card decks...

[Matthew Woehlke]

Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> On Friday 10 October 2008, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> Luciano Montanaro wrote:
>>> I did something similar with my tigullio deck:
>>>
>>> http://www.cirulla.net/listing/kde_stuff/tigullio-modern.svg
>>>
>>> This should be very easy to package once the KHotNewStuff is integrated.
>> Have you tried playing with this yet? I can tell you, from my experience
>> with my Oxygen-based deck, that in games like freecell/klondike/etc
>> (where red/black matters as well as just suit), I had real problems when
>> the colors were too different. It's not enough for the individual suits
>> to be distinctive, you /also/ need to be able to easily tell the
>> difference between clubs/spades and hearts/diamonds easily and quickly.
> 
> Actually yes, I've used it for a while, but I'm playing Spider at the hard 
> setting most of the time. In that game it is actually useful to quickly 
> distinguish suits, and there is no affinity between black and red suits.

Ah. Yes, for games where red/black doesn't matter (Spider, Simple Simon, 
I think Grandfather, Yukon, Mod3, probably others), it's not a problem. 
For Freecell I found it to be a serious issue when I had to think about 
if I could put a card on top of another where I used to be able to make 
that judgment almost instantly. There seems to be a fine balance between 
making the suits different enough to get the advantage, but similar 
enough to still easily and quickly tell red from black.

(You can change the difficulty on Spider? kpat crashes whenever I try, 
though admittedly I'm always trying to change it to 'easy'. Hey, I like 
a quick game (probably why I like Freecell so much). If I'm looking for 
a long, grueling game, I'd rather play Go ;-).)

> I agree the colors are distracting in Klondike. It would be easy enough to 
> change them though to something like your suggestion.

Sure. On the other hand there is value to distinct colors, it just 
doesn't play as well with e.g. Klondike. It's you're deck, and if you're 
mainly playing games where red/black doesn't matter, then you're free to 
keep it how it is. I was just offering an observation.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
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