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I see that the Poker site now has nice card markup support. Could that be added to this site?

In addition to being on topic here, we also have significant questions in , , , and that could benefit from the enhanced graphical presentation of pictoral cards.

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    Here I was thinking this was about Magic: the Gathering again...now I'm sad. Jan 30, 2012 at 22:22
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    @IanPugsley - well, we got an answer for that. Unless a public legal API emerges, it doesn't seem likely that things will change there. I understand the reasoning, but it makes me sad too!
    – Pat Ludwig Mod
    Jan 30, 2012 at 23:29
  • "They never run out of ink for their no stamp" -- Col Potter :)
    – Stephen
    Feb 1, 2012 at 1:19

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Agreed, that makes a lot of sense. But: It's not as easy as just enabling the renderer from the Poker site as is. I've looked at several card game posts on boardgames.se, and there are a few differences between the way the poker people mark up the cards and what happens here.

On the poker site, there's pretty much only one way – {face}{suit}. I.e. 7:clubs:, J♦, A♥.

On your site, there's more to it:

Ten as ten

Examples: What is the best lead when calling next on a declined bower?, Take out double at first opportunity to double?

The poker people pretty much unanimously use a T to denote a ten; bg.se also likes to use 10. This isn't a big issue, since there's no 1 or 0 card, so there's no ambiguity.

Suit first

Example: What is the best lead when calling next on a declined bower?

Poker always puts the face first – Q♣ –, bg.se also uses the other way arround ♣Q. This isn't a big issue either.

Multiple cards per suit

Example: Take out double at first opportunity to double?

On poker, it's A♦ K♦ Q♦. Here, it's often ♦ AKQ. This has a higher chance of ambiguity, but I don't think there are any real-life issues anyway (this seems to always be written in a suit-first manner, which is good; allowing both directions would create ambiguities).

Face wildcard

Example: Should I Use A "Negative Double" Over a Possible "Short Club" Bid And Overcall in Bridge?

♠ AJxx meaning "Ace of spades, jack of spades, and two unspecified spades".

My plan is to render this as two cards with faces, two cards without. Thoughts?

Bridge over troubled water

(sorry for the bad pun)

Example: Should I Use A "Negative Double" Over a Possible "Short Club" Bid And Overcall in Bridge?

This is a real issue that I'm not sure how to handle. Here are two sentences that may very commonly appear in a post about Bridge:

I raised to 2 clubs vs. I played the 2 of clubs

Obviously the first one shouldn't be rendered as a card. But there's no way for the renderer to distinguish between them. What do we make of this problem?

In closing

Please give feedback, comments, solutions, and other possible issues I haven't thought of. In particular it should be noted that most of your example tags don't have any questions with cards in them, so there may be problems with other games that I didn't consider.

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  • For the bridge bid of 2 clubs, why wouldn't the format proposed for ajxx work as well? someone would say I raised to 2 x:clubs: to get the blank?
    – Stephen
    Feb 1, 2012 at 13:45
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    @Stephen Note that the renderer uses an image of a card (even when representing the ajxx). I think bridge bids should either be left as text, or possibly converted to unicode symbols (2♣).
    – tttppp
    Feb 1, 2012 at 17:32
  • @tttppp Yes of course ... so then it could be that 2:clubs: is converted to unicode and 2:cclubs: is a card with the 2 of clubs? 2:cdiamonds: etc?
    – Stephen
    Feb 1, 2012 at 17:43
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    @Stephen That sounds good to me. Maybe there could be some notation for hand listings too: :cclubs:{AKQJ52} :cdiamonds:{A} etc. I'm interested to hear more ideas around this too :-)
    – tttppp
    Feb 1, 2012 at 18:05
  • Maybe too much to ask, can we do something for things like these: a declarer play problem could just show North and South, like here: boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/5168/…. A defensive play problem could just show West and North etc. A common way to write a single bridge hand is spades,hearts, diamonds, clubs (without showing the suit symbols). So something like AKxx,Qxx,Kxx,Axx. btw, x is a card smaller than ten, showing an empty card is quite weird.
    – Aryabhata
    Feb 1, 2012 at 20:49
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    btw, if you are willing to use this handviewer from BBO: bridgebase.com/tools/hvdoc.html, it might solve all the bridge related problems. This handviewer can also shows tricks as they are played etc.
    – Aryabhata
    Feb 1, 2012 at 20:50
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    I guess I misunderstood what was done for the poker site. I wouldn't recommend trying to transform free text into card picture on this site. I would like a way to denote cards with markup so that they get rendered as an image.
    – Pat Ludwig Mod
    Feb 9, 2012 at 22:35
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    The reason being is that, yes, I totally understand that we have X different ways to parse things due to supporting a variety of games. However, for most of them, it would be great if we could edit in [[4C]] and have it render as an image (for example).
    – Pat Ludwig Mod
    Feb 9, 2012 at 22:37
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    @balpha - Could you take a look at my (closed duplicate) proposal for this? meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/q/825/677 I think a system which requires specifically-defined tags (as Pat has also suggested) to trigger card image generation would bypass most of the concerns you've raised.
    – Iszi
    Jun 20, 2012 at 22:01

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