In the last few weeks I received a torrent of emails with ideas, feedback, anecdotes and suggestions. I’m excited about each and every email that finds its way into my inbox and am often all eager to bring your ideas to life. In the last week I finally found some time to work on some of these topics. That’s why I’m releasing quite a list of small and larger new features and tweaks today.

Piglets

One of the more popular Doppelkopf pub rules is playing with Piglets. If a player got both aces of diamonds on their hand, they can declare “piglets”. The aces of diamonds become the highest trumps in the game (higher than the tens of hearts even).

The tutorial has included the “piglets” rule for quite a while now, the browser game, however, didn’t. That’s a little confusing. So confusing, in fact, that a player from California reached out to ask what’s going on. If the missing piglets rule makes waves on an international scale you know it’s time to fix it.

Starting today, you can activate the *Piglets” rule in the browser game. If you’ve got both aces of diamonds, you can make a corresponding declaration. Heads up, there’s a clear order for declarations: Solos come first, then weddings, then piglets. That means that another player declaring a wedding will get precedence over you trying to declare piglets.

Player Behavior

A lot of feedback in the last few weeks revolved around the behavior of the computer players. Somehow they never announce anything. Somehow they play too high trumps a little too often. Somehow that’s all annoying at times. I get it. Tweaking the player behavior is a little finicky, but I believe that I managed to make things a little less bad. It’s far from perfect, but that’s alright. Starting today, we’ve got the following improvements in place:

• Players announce (“Re”, “Kontra”, “no 90”, you name it) a little more often now. There are still no mandatory announcements yet (working on it next, I promise)
• Players will play unnecessarily high trumps a little less often if a lower trump would be more suitable

Who’s leading the first trick anyways?

One suggestion that is so obvious in hindsight made it into this week’s update: When you start a new game, we now show who’s leading the first trick and who gets to declare first. Especially when you’re contemplating playing a solo it’s crucial to understand who’s playing the first card of the first trick.

A lot of you asked for a rule that always allows the soloist to open the first trick. Great idea, but that one’s not included just yet. It’s on my list.

Keep the emails coming. And as always: Have fun!

— Ham

Title image: Public Domain Image Archive / Biodiversity Heritage Library / Smithsonian Libraries and Archives