Joyce’s Musings

Set is a very good game, so a lot of folks have written implementations of the game.

This implementation, written in AJAX, is probably the nicest implementation I’ve ever seen.

There’s also the official implementation.

There’s even other folks that have implemented the game in Java.

Here’s a version that actually lets you play online with other players.

Most of the implementations of Set that I’ve found follow these basic designs. They are single player, have significant usability issues, and/or aren’t very pretty to look at. Our implementation of set is intended to solve these three problems:
1) Users will be able to play the game against people all over the internet.
2) The interface will be designed to be intuitive and easy to use.
3) The interface and cards will look nice and attractive.

Our current implementation doesn’t solve any of these issues, but we’re working on it. The next release will solve Issue #1 and I just asked a game interface designer to help us redo the entire interface with a much more attractive look and feel. That should solve #3. Then we just need to get back to solving #2, which is, of course, the hardest problem of all to solve.

The project is currently on hiatus, as we’ve been spending all of our time working on getting Arimaa up to speed and polished for its first single player release. I’ve found that switching programs when you’re getting stuck in a rut can really help you think some things out more clearly and be able to come back to your first program with fresh ideas and newfound excitement.