Next Step: Uno

I'm posting this here so that I have one reason more for not slacking off: the next thing I'm going to try is to make a game of Uno based on Harmonic. Why another dummy instead of Magic? Because, while Uno is of course much simpler than Magic, they share a few features that make it interesting as a prototype. And as Uno is much less complex, it's faster to spot where there are still features missing.

So what are these similarities? I identified the following few:

• it's a card game, duh
• unlike TicTacToe, Uno can have more than two players
• the turn order in Uno can change
• there are multiple zones in which cards can reside; the deck is hidden, the discard pile is public, and the hands are private to each player
• Uno has randomness for shuffling the deck
• some cards require additional decisions by the player

I also found that at least two things are very different from magic - at least in regard to Uno's applicability as a prototype: there is no such thing as tokens, i.e. no new objects are introduced into the game after it starts; and there is no significant strategic part to Uno, so testing the feasibility of an AI is hard. Still, Uno should be really easy and still provides a lot of the things I was hoping to find, so that's where I'll go next.