Tag Info

A lot of this really applies to all games, not just single-player ones. The biggest reason for me is that computer games provide a limited interface - small screen, limited controls - and that can be painful to deal with. It's pretty much impossible, with current technology, for a computer game to provide a comfortable view of a table-sized board and ...

Computerized board and card games can have an advantage when it enables automation of what would otherwise be mundane or tedious tasks: Shuffling cards in Dominion is a good example; eliminating shuffling applies to lots of classic card games that have wide on-line audiences like hearts, spades, etc. Computer versions also work well if they can abstract ...

I tend to like Dominion more online than face to face. The game has a ton of shuffling, and hence you can play much faster online. Also, I am a bit biased, but online implementations often give access to game logs, which you can then crunch and compute interesting statistics from. For example, my Dominion stats site and my Race for the Galaxy stats site ...

The most widely used interchange format for Scrabble games is documented at http://poslfit.com/scrabble/gcg/ It's used for example by cross-tables.com, Quackle, (Mike Wolfberg's program) WHAT, and proprietary software for webcasts of national and world championships. The so-called .gcg (for "generic crossword game") format is a human-editable text file ...

If you enjoyed Shandalar, then the spiritual successor is Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 Download the demo. It hits all your points, just ignore the online play option.

Facebook Scrabble uses the new dictionary. This can also be played via your iPhone (connects to the same same servers, so players on different platforms may play). The iPhone version has single-player. Quadplex is another site that hosts Scrabble.

There is no other option except to get better at chess, I believe. I have seen interviews with the grandmasters who have had experience playing against computers, and they have noticed certain patterns that differentiate a human from a computer player. One example I remember is that computers try to target uncovered valuable pieces, even if they are safely ...

Basically, you have to find out what level your computer plays at. And then train to beat that level. Computers are very good at looking deep into "branches" of moves. That's where they have an advantage over humans, and that's why the best ones can beat Gary Kasparov. Computers aren't quite as good at certain "judgmental" aspects of chess, like when to ...