Tag Archives: modern art: the card game

The House Selling Game

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Real life is full of games such as contract bidding, gift exchanging, and national voting — a topic that I’ve previously touched upon in a few different posts about “real-life mechanics”. These real-life games are no less competitive than the board games that we play around tables, and in fact might be much more important. As I wrote in my “Burning Freeways” article on blind bidding, the winning bidder earned $800,000 more than Cal Trans expected and could have made as much as $3.5 million over costs.

In that article I also briefly touched upon how the blind bidding of house sales can be affected by just the teeniest bit of external information from a realtor. At the time I hadn’t sold a house. Now I have, and I’ve learned a lot more about the various parts of house-selling, and as usual they offer up new possibilities for the designs of These Games of Ours. Continue reading →

Game Decisions & AI: A Look at Modern Art: The Card Game

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The last two years have been a programming whirlwind for me at my real-life job, Skotos. And that’s a segue into the fact that I just released my fifth iPhone eurogame conversion in 17 months. This time around, it’s Reiner Knizia’s Modern Art: The Card Game, the cardplay variant of his older Modern Art auction game.

I’ve written a bit about the development of each of my five iDevice games. You can find past article about Reiner Knizia’s Money, about Reiner Knizia’s High Society, about Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms, and about Michael Schacht’s Gold!

One topic that I keep returning to in these articles is that of artificial intelligences, or AI — the algorithms that make strategic decisions for the computer players in my card games. When I finished Money I said that I learned that abstract seat-of-your-pants decisions worked as well as calculations did. Then when I discussed High Society I talked about all the exacting calculations I built into my AIs. When I completed Gold! I acknowledged that AIs were different for each game … and that’s the impressions that’s likely to stay with me.

Modern Art: The Card Game made me appreciate the huge multitude of decisions that players make even when playing what seems like a pretty simple game. So that’s what I’m going to talk about today: how Modern Art: The Card Game works; how my AI for it works; and what that all reveals about the game’s design.
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