Bourre Poker Game Finally Open Source

Mon, 25 May 2009 18:34:00 GMT

After several years of sporadic work, my Bourre game has been released to open source hosted at Google Code. As it stands it is an engine only at this point. There is no user interface at this point and only a driver program to run it. I have some short term goals listed on the summary page. If anyone is interested in participating from UI standpoint, please step forward. Pie in the sky longer term goals including porting it from Java to Objective C/Cocoa and making an iPhone app. Considering it took me 2-3 years to get this far with the java version, I suspect we will be on iPhone revision 12 by the time I get around to doing anything like this.

For more information on the game, please see the wikipedia page.

Too Little Time To Shuffle

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 05:54:37 GMT

As Christmas grows near, my Organizational Behavior course is coming to an end. I have enjoyed the class tremendously but I haven't had the opportunity to tinker around with new technology or complete any fun programming projects. I did say fun so work doesn't count. Not having this needed outlet puts a serious damper on my energy level as well as professional motivation. Now that things are starting to slow down a bit, what will I do?

For the past several months I've had poker on my mind and have considered writing a game in Java. My friends and I play a card game call Bourre ad nauseum. Sometimes we play 20+ rounds in an evening which equates to 4 hours or so. Bourre is a trick based card game similar to spades(I've never played spades but I've heard people compare the two). A typical Bourre hand is played like this. The dealer deals 5 cards to each player. After dealing, the dealer is allowed to flip up one of his cards to determine the trump suite. This card is visible to all players. At this point players decide if they are in or out. They call this out one by one moving clockwise around the table. A player can say in, out, or check. Once a single player is in, the check option is no longer available. Players that drop are out for the duration of this particular game which could be many hands. Players that remain in are allowed to draw up to five of their cards by discarding a like number. Once the draw is complete, the player to the left of the dealer starts the game by leading a card. The next player must throw a card of the same suite if he has one, otherwise he can "throw off" another suit or "trump" the played suite. The highest card of the led suite wins the trick. If someone trumps the led suite, the trump card beats all cards in any other suite. Any player not winning a single trick must match the pot. Any player winning three tricks wins the pot. If no one gets 3 tricks to win the game another game is dealt and lather, rinse, and repeat cycle continues. It's an addicting game that is a lot of fun to play.

My first attempt will be a command line version of the game. Not sure of the chances of actually completing it, but I would really like to. With a little luck and inspiration, maybe I'll be able to recruit someone to work on a rudimentary user interface down the road. At any rate, I better search for my The Art of Computer Programming books by Donald Knuth to brush up on a shuffle algorithm. If I find any typos I promise to share the $2.56 finder fee.

Unruly Rambling - poker tag

Bourre Poker Game Finally Open Source

Too Little Time To Shuffle