One of the things we do at work is “Lunch and Learn”, a weekly seminar led by one of the development staff. Over the past few months, we’ve been doing the Solitaire Cipher. It was designed as a secure cipher operating with an ordinary deck of playing cards.

It was an interesting programming challenge, and a refreshing one for me. I hope to post some of the pertinent pieces of code soon. (As a parenthetical note, what public code repository solution would my readers suggest?)

I used a hybrid test-driven development, and found that it worked well for my style of coding. I’m beginning to use this thinking at work, where we’re stubbing out interfaces, but using unit tests to explore their behavior.

Another thing these challenges are good for is providing a testbed for new technologies. Since we’re taking a little more time with this one than usual, I’m going to expand my solution and make it a WCF service. I’m also going to implement the standard .NET framework cryptography hooks, including the ICryptoProvider interface and the SymmetricAlgorithm class.

If you’re looking to do something similar at your workplace, or just for a challenge at home, we’re cherry-picking through the Ruby Quiz list.

Kung Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island is a member of a family of card games by Z-Man Games, in which players play B movie producers whose competing versions of a movie battle it out to the death.

Each card in the deck has a buzz word from the genre. At the beginning of the game, players pick six cards and use as many of those words to form the title of the movie as possible. Ours was “Shaolin Ninja Black vs. Little Eagle Commando”. Just the title of our movie gives you an idea what this game is like.

Players amass Character, Location, and Prop cards, which all have defense ratings. Players play Creature cards to attack other movies, and can replace Locations in other movies to spice things up. Another kind of card, the Special Effects card, change the balance of the game. Mayhem continues until someone plays the “Roll the Credits” card and ends the game.

The game is best enjoyed when one plays the cards as though they were narrating the movie. The results can be hilarious! I’d recommend their games. For added fun, you can mix the decks from their B-Movie games for a crossover catastrophe.

Carcassonne: New World is a recent addition to the family of Carcassonne games. The mechanics are similar to other Carcassonne games, in that you have interconnecting square tiles, people-shaped pawns, and a game of strategy where tile and pawn placement is paramount. In this game, the pawns are settlers trying to expand colonies from Plymouth to Jamestown, and the tiles contain towns, farms, and roads.

Carcassonne’s farms have been replaced by plains in New World, which can contain wooded areas with animals. Trappers (laying-down settler pawns, akin to farmers in Carcassonne) score points not for each tile, but for each animal icon in their domain. There are also no rivers to keep plains areas small, which makes jockeying for position harder.

There are also two special pawns called surveyors. At the end of each turn, a surveyor pawn moves, westward if possible. The net effect is that once you have two tiles in leftmost column of tiles, both surveyors will move one column to the “west”. Any standing settlers east of the surveyors, like shopkeepers (akin to knights) and robbers are returned to their owners. You get a hefty bonus if you complete a road or town where a surveyor stands, and thus there is a great impetus to expand westward.

I have also played Carcassonne and Carcassonne: The Castle, and whereas the confined space of The Castle adds space pressure to the game, the necessity of completing features before your settlers become “obsolete” in New World adds some time pressure to the game. I must admit, based on playing New World once, it’s destined to become my favorite version.

After much waiting, our family got a Wii for Christmas. Rather than spend a lot on games the kids won’t play, we decided to follow a similar model to the way we consume DVDs. We got a subscription to GameFly, and will only buy the games the kids really want.

Our Wii was bundled with Wii Sports. We spent most of the day taking turns playing the Wii. It was a lot of fun! the games were easy to learn and intuitive, though we certainly did not approach the skill of the kids, who took turns more often than we did.

Frankly I had a little trouble with Boxing and Tennis, but greatly enjoyed Golf and Baseball. I wish games like Boxing and Baseball had the depth Golf does. It’s no EA Sports simulation, but it’s got enough content to satisfy casual fans.

I’m chomping at the bit to try some football, basketball, and baseball games.

Edit: Watching my friends play reminded me of another criticism they leveled yesterday. The Mii people don’t have any arms! It was a little disturbing to them to see these Mii people doing stuff with bobbing hands, mitts, what have you.

One of the gifts we got at the TKD white elephant Christmas gift exchange was Yahtzee Free for All. We decided to play it while waiting for dinner to finish, and later between dinner and dessert. The first game had 3 players; the second, 4. The adults had played Yahtzee before, but the kids hadn’t.

Going into the game, I didn’t have my hopes up. Yahtzee tends to be somewhat boring unless you’re playing with the right crowd.

The game play in Yahtzee Free-For-All is not dissimilar to Yahtzee, in that players use dice to fulfill combos (2’s, full house, etc.). However, the combos are printed on a deck of cards in this game, so the combos available to score with vary from turn to turn. And, because combos are vulnerable for a round before you score them, you can steal other player’s combos. Combos vary in value from 2 to 10.

With a limited number of combos, the game could stalemate quickly, but they added a poker chip mechanic to prevent this. If you can’t complete a combo, you place a chip next to each card. When you complete a combo, you score any chips placed by it immediately, thereby giving an incentive to try for combos that others can’t complete. The game ends when you run out of cards or chips, and there are only enough chips to allow for eight or so failures to complete combos.

One minor annoyance: we had trouble understanding the special rules for 2 or 3 players, so we ignored them. It wasn’t clear how a person would end up with more than one Home space (where combos are vulnerable) filled at a time.

We found that the added player interaction made Yahtzee surprisingly fun again. Kudos!