Hacker News Reader

Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds..

Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some into making a deck sorter..

View on HN

Sort the deck ino 4 stacks by suit, have somebody else remove the cards without looking at the suits, shuffle stacks back into a deck.

Yes. I think you’d want half the players to watch the stack placement and half the removal and rearrangement. Lots of incentive to peek.

I get that Diplomacy feeling where if you pull off cheating, good, it's part of the game. Like insider trading, or when I'd play the banker in monopoly and sleight-of-hand. Ledgerdemain, if you will

Maybe you could just shuffle a full deck and then peel off 12 cards. Probably better simulates the stock market, there's a good chance somebody is going to get totally screwed (the case where the top of the deck is predominantly one suit). I wouldn't want to play for money that way, but playing for fake money maybe?

I'd rather play with cards as well.

You can easily set up the cards with two honest Players. Player 1 sorts and makes four piles S-C--H-D. Player 1 looks away, Player 2 puts 8/12 markers randomly on either the first two piles or the last two piles, then randomizes the piles (so Player 1 gets no information from the order).

The hard part is how to do the trading with real cards. You would have to structure/limit the trading a lot instead of the free-for-all that seems to be going on.

1. Grab at least 4 cards of each suit

2. Sort them to follow a repeating pattern of 4 distinct suits, e.g. ♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠...

2. Cut the deck, putting the top part under the bottom part

3. (The deck will still have that pattern, but shifted by an unknown amount)

4. Counting out from the top, remove the following cards:

- 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th

- 2nd, 6th

- 3rd, 7th

Or: take 3, skip 1, take 3, skip 1, take 1, skip 3, take 1

Each of these groups will be of the same suit, so the deck should have the figgy distribution.

This sounds like the most annoying possible way to play a game that is expected to be done a dozen times per hour.

That is a much cleverer solution than I thought up using two different people to randomize the set of 4 suits against each other to prevent peeks.

I guess either works though. For speed you would likely want the players to help either sort by suit or sort by a 4 suit pattern.

or sort them into piles and have people shuffle the piles?

I should've clarified that, but I wanted to find out how to do it as a single person.

Person 1 enters the room, makes a bunch of decks and puts them in boxes. Leaves the room.

Person 2 enters the room, shuffles the boxes, leaves the room.

Person 1 re-enters the room and picks a box.

Person 1 made every deck exactly the same way though.

I guess Person 2 could run some simple validations of what Person 1 initially did.

Then again, Person 2 could have also replaced all of Person 1s decks with their own.

Person 1 would make exactly one of each possibility. They're just deciding which cards go in which pile/box.

make a bunch of decks from identical standard decks (all blue or all red) and then just mix up the boxes?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com