Master Schnapsen/66 Is Released
Master Schnapsen/66 has been approved and is now available in the iTunes App Store. Thanks (again) to all the people who helped get it into such excellent shape. Thanks especially to our friends Martin Tompa (instigation, consultation, testing, and blogging) and Saul Perkes (graphics, animations, and testing), and to the beta testers. We’re making plans for a small coffee, cake, and card party, then it’s back to the labs to work on our next project.
By the way, if you’re the sort of ahead-of-the-curve outfit that would be interested in financing an OCaml-on-iOS project—or similar—we’d be very happy to talk. It wouldn’t have to be anything about card games—we’re always looking for new challenges to tackle.
If you’re more the card player type, there is a free version of the app called Master Schnapsen/66 Lite that you can try out to see if you like the game. After grappling with unfamiliarity for a little while at the beginning, I’ve become very fond of Schnapsen and am teaching it to my children. It’s an excellent introduction to trick-taking card games in general. If you already know Schnapsen or Sixty-Six, we honestly feel that our engine is the best one out there, and it will teach you a thing or two about the game. This is what inspired Martin to write a blog about Schnapsen.
We’ve revamped the website for the release. In addition to Martin’s blog, you’ll find a description of the Schnapsen/66 Touch interface, the rules of Schnapsen and Sixty-Six, and suggestions for good Schnapsen and Sixty-Six strategy. We occasionally get website visitors looking for the rules of Schnapsen. The rules page describes the exact rules played by our app, our best effort to reconcile all the small variations into the most enjoyable games. When you write software to play a game, you immediately notice ambiguities in the usual descriptions of the rules. We’ve tried to make our description clear and complete. (Feel free to contact us with suggestions or corrections.)
Posted by: Jeffrey