A lot has happened since I last posted about my hobby project Trickster’s Table over a year ago.
The app has gotten some good press and very good reviews on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Since my last post here I’ve added 5 new licensed games:
- Yokai Septet 4-player by Muneyuki Yokouchi - a very strategic partnership game where you are trying to capture sevens
- Splitter by Stefan Nikolić - a roll and write game where you score by grouping together numbers (two 2s, three 3s, etc.)
- Short Zoot Suit by Taylor Reiner - a trick taking game where you try to balance short suiting and winning tricks
- Dealer’s Dilemma by Shreesh Bhat - a streamlined precision bidding game where you bid with the cards in your hand
- Hotdog - a 2-player bidding game where players can bid to select if high or low cards win, trump, and a special rank
I started experimenting writing the games in Rust earlier this year and the experiment paid off. The compiled Rust code can run many more simulations than Dart (which I had used before to implement the games) in the same time. This reduces the amount of time it takes to get high level play implemented compared to training a neural network to play the game. The level of play has improved a lot in the newer games and I’m going back and rewriting the old game engines in Rust between adding new games. The attached picture is a search tree for Hotdog where the bot is deciding how to bid. You can find the source code for the newer games written in Rust here: https://github.com/dbravender/tricksterstable-rs/
If you’d like to support or just follow along, check out Patreon. Members can vote in the new game polls to help shape what’s next for Trickster’s Table! 50% of donations are shared with designers/rights holders of games that appear in the app (divided by play time) and 50% of donations are used to fund the development of new games.
