My plan was just to use a plain old physical deck of cards and privately email people their hole cards.

if spikebrennan wants to use the real thing, that’s fine with me too. of course, if e idles, then that might cause a problem later.

Dynasties which depend on the deaker can be fun, but we have had a bunch like that in a row. Even if spike is willing to do the work—as we saw last time that can end a dynasty prematurely. Lets try and keep this dynasty less dealer dependent =)

Yeah, I was initially going to go with a physical deck and email, but it was quite fiddly to get secure email addresses from everyone in the Werewolf dynasty. I’m not sure it’d scale up well to a game where there were lots of new emails to everyoe, every round.

we can try it, if it doesn’t work, we can remove it.

I am not voting against the proposal, just thinking about what to do.  As I see it, under the physical deck system, emails would only be necessary during each deal, which probably isn’t such a big deal.  I’m thinking that if everyone uses their own deck: (i) two or more people could have the same card in their hand, which really wouldn’t be poker; and (ii) how do we avoid cheating?

Yeah, we can lynch anyone who reloads the page a bunch.

The multiple copies of the same card might be a problem… any way to address that?

Is there a way to create a deck that we’d have to log into and it’d give us all cards from 1 deck?

The checksum lets us detect cheating - given a full deck, it’s possible to regenerate the checksum and see whether it matches the one given by the player at the start of the game. If we thought someone was cheating, we’d ask them to send their deck list to Spike, who could then generate a checksum for it (I’d give him access to a script for this) and see if it matched the one they announced at the start of the game.

A card-dealing system could be bolted onto the GNDT somehow (maybe a “DICE” variant where you enter “CARD”, and it’d tell you what you drew, log it in the event log, but obscure that part of the log for everyone else?) but it’d be a hefty little project for whoever took it on.

But yes, maybe a physical deck would be okay, if we can quickly get emails for everyone. Perhaps the Zahndorf Post Office could become a standard BlogNomic document.

Did I miss something?  When did Kevan de-idle?

Yesterday.

Incidentally, don’t let the pre-existence of the deck-generations script affect anyone’s voting on this, it only took five minutes to write.

I don’t like the fact that everyone has their own deck and each person knows the order of their deck.

There is also no guard against cheating.  Because you save this to a text file, there is no stopping someone from claiming they have a deck full of aces (unless I am misunderstanding it).

I don’t think anyone will cheat, and I think the safeguards we have will prevent it.

I’ll look for an alternative that will allow everyone to use one deck that wont be a hassle for everyone to use. I’m ok with getting a hand mailed to me, though.

COV. I got to thinking about this. Alot of poker games use 2 or more decks shuffled together so it wouldn’t be too far off to draw the same card. think of it as all our decks mixed together and thats the order we get.

I think this can work:  then for Hold-Em, each player can roll DICE52 twice in the GNDT (rerolling if the same number comes up twice), and use those numbered cards in his deck as his hole cards.  No emails required.

You still have the problem of cheating.  I am not saying that anyone would try to cheat, but someone could claim they have pocket aces when they really do not.

I think that we need Kevan to explain how the checksums work—can anyone generate a given Player’s deck based on the posted checksum (such that anyone would be able to peek at anyone else’s cards)?  Or does it take more effort to reverse engineer someone’s deck from their checksum?  Kevan?

I forget, but isn’t the GNDT programmed in Perl or PHP or something?  If it’s any of a small variety of web programming languages, I’m certain I could code cards into the GNDT.  Let me know if that would be helpful.  Otherwise, for my vote,  .