Screenshot may be shrunk down a bit but another "future" idea I was tossing around in my head was to do a Mah-Jong game (More simple Chineese rules). Many people see those tiles and they are like "Yeah, I played that…you match 2 tiles at a time and…" Nope! That would be Shanghai (also goes by another name that escapes me at the moment). Real Mah-Jong games are quite different and the rules are just as different between variations. American sets have joker tiles (I have one of those too), Some games may be "special hands only", or any number of twists. The basic version I play most is the Chineese version I read in "A MahJong Handbook". The basic object of the game is to make 4 sets of combinations like 3 of a kind (Pung), 4 of a kind (Kong), runs of three (Chow), and one pair to win. It's a bit of a mix between rummy and poker really. There are many twists that make the game unique…like you could have rules that if a player wins by picking up a discarded title of another player, the person who discarded the tile has to pay the losses for ALL 3 players. So "not loosing" a hand is as important as "winning" a hand. Scores of a hand depend on things like if the hand is concealed (double points), special tiles in the hand (That are harder to use), All one suit, Special hands, If the player is East (East position pays or recieves double points), and much more. It sounds complicated at first but gets much easier to understand after a few hands.
We used to play this at work with a cheap $40 set I had on break. Never played for "points"…would take WAY too long to play a full game. (16 hands and ussualy more if East keeps winning). Just who won the hand. Usually get 2 hands in before going back to work, but it was a daily event that drew in crowds of co-workers standing arround watching (and some waiting to play).Playing with 4 players is the normal method. If I do try to do this, it's going to be hard. It's easy to look at a hand with the tiles you have and you insinctively know…I need to get rid of this tile, I need this tile to win, etc.. But to make the computer "smart" and analyze the hand to know what to do…there are so many posibilities… Will be hard to define (at least for me). The picture shows too many tiles and such… I was just trying to see where the best placement was for the tiles for all 4 players with things like (the maximum possible) amount of tiles fitting on a players side.<a href="http://imageshack.us"><img src="http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/7348/mahjongexamplesv4.gif" border="0" alt="Image Hosted by ImageShack.us" /></a>Well…someday maybe. A fun game if people take the time to learn it.
Interesting. Sounds like it would be difficult to do something of that sort. That would be like doing a card game. To me that would be near impossible. I'm good at doing other stuff…
It's kinda like cards but instead of 4 suits you have three (Crack, Bamboo, and Dots). Also Wind tiles that could add bonuses to the players (North,South East or West) depending if they matched wind of the round or thier own wind (position) for the hand. Dragon tiles as well, (harder to use since you can make runs with them). Cards (depending what type you make) can be easy or hard. (Crazy 8's/Poker/Gin Rummy). But Mah-Jong has sooo many different posibilitys depending on what the player is going for on the hand. A matter of playing it safe going out as fast as posible / or going for a hand that is X2, X4, X8 etc… that would wipe out a player.
Make the AI do a few quick checks and decide what to look for with a nice BruteForceAlgorithm
From the looks of it,I think this game would be nice to make without AI just to get use to allowing for a wide array of options for the player to choose from and making dynamic rule sets that aren't completely hardcoded