Bridge in the works?

[CleverFox2]

Is the game “Bridge” in the works? It a popular royalty free card game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_bridge

[robinzig]

As you observe, Bridge is a public domain game - so on one level it might seem that any developer who fancies it could try to make Bridge available here on BGA. It also has the benefits of using a standard deck of cards (and therefore art assets being easily available), and of the core rules being very easy to enforce.

However, if you dive a bit deeper, I think there are EXTREMELY good reasons why Bridge would never really work on this platform. And I say this as someone who believes bridge is one of the finest games ever devised (I was once a competitive player, over 10 years ago - and although I don't play these days, that's more due to practicalities than to having lost enthusiasm for the game itself).

Note, this is all my opinion, nothing to do with BGA. (But I doubt this is something BGA admins have thought about at all - I don't assume they've ever even played bridge.)

The main problem with bridge in any format - IRL or online - is that it is a partnership game. And moreover, one that works best when you have a regular partner who you play with much of the time, and have explicit agreements with them as to what different bids mean in different situations, also cardplay agreements etc. And further, the laws of the game make it mandatory that any partnership must make the other pair at the same table aware of any of those agreements.

Any kind of tournament play - duplicate bridge, in either Pairs or Teams format - would be a complete nonstarter, as BGA has no concept of a game result that takes into account more than one table, and no way (as far as I know) of enforcing the same deal at different tables. Also without a robust enforcement system, there is no way to stop players cheating by discussing with friends/team-mates the content of hands that they might play later. We know BGA has difficulty booting out cheats in any case - bridge takes it to a whole new level of difficulty due to the possibility of illegal communication, and the difficulty of building up a case to "prove" players are cheating.

About the only kind of bridge I can begin to imagine working on BGA is casual (non-tournament) rubber bridge. And if there are 4 regular players who know the game and agree to start a table together, that would probably work OK. But if you follow what most people use BGA for - having the system to find "random" opponents for them (which in bridge would presumably involve a random partner) - I just don't see how that can work, unless it can be guaranteed that everyone in the player pool knows the game reasonably well, including knowing the basics of at least 2 or 3 common bidding systems, it's just not going to work. Bridge is no fun whatsoever if playing with a partner who you have no way of trusting, especially if you can't even agree a basic set of agreements. Nor is it fun if you and your partner understand each other fine but your opponents are clearly clueless. With most games on BGA, players can start a game without having any prior knowledge, and by reading the rulebook and/or experimenting with the interface, eventually figuring it out. Bridge isn't like that - the rules as such as really straightforward, but to learn you really need to learn with a partner, ideally as part of a regular group, and learn a particular bidding system together.

Finally, there are already several dedicated bridge sites on the web, with large player bases - Bridge Base Online and Bridge Club Live being two of the biggest that I know of. (Apologies if I'm not allowed to mention other sites but I judge this is OK, admins please feel free to edit if not!) They already have a critical mass of players, on platforms dedicated to the game which therefore have specialised solutions to many of the problems I mentioned - notably duplicate tournaments that work, and (at least in BCL's case) people who's job it is to root out cheats. And "casual play" platforms that at least keep partnerships together so you can drop on with your favourite partner and try to find other pairs to play against - in a large duplicate movement with a guaranteed decent number of other scores to compare against due to the size of the playerbase. Even on those platforms, and I speak from experience, casual play with random opponents, let alone random partners, can often be a hit or miss experience.

TLDR: like it or not, although bridge is an utterly fantastic game, and I don't want to try to be elitist about it and would encourage anyone to learn - I really don't think a general gaming platform like BGA is the right place for it at all. As a developer myself, it would not in my opinion be worth even the relatively moderate effort required to get a basic game up and running. And doing it "properly" require things the platform just does not have.

[Phoxtrot]

Well, yeah proper bridge support would require a lot of work on the framework.

And rubber bridge is quaint at best especially since hardly no-one has a system adapted to it anyway.

Beyond the counting of points, bridge requires some support of convention cards and it requires the ability to be able to register/join a table as a pair.

What could be nice and is not often found on bridge sites is the possibility to play bridge against the par.

If you can plug in a double dummy solver (not sure if there are free open source ones) then you could score a hand in IMPs (or KO scoring) with only one table with rotating vulnerabilities (like in any modern match) by comparing the score with the par.
I fully understand that the double dummy par isn't the "human par with limited information" but it's the best you can do to score hands with only one table in an objective manner.
Not sure about how much load on the server a double dummy solver would be...

I don't see that happening, but it would be nice
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This being said, support for duplicate tournaments (in the bridge sense of the word, not the chess one) would be cool and could be adapted to some other games than bridge (like spades).

Note:
Duplicate essentially makes sense for strategic games that are divided into independent rounds (or "hands) where the luck part is mostly encapsulated in the draw of each hand/board. This mostly means card games where you play many hands and where the deck is shuffled between hands and only between hands

A lighter form of duplicate tournament for any board game where just the initial setup is duplicated (by using the same seed) could also be cool but it does requires a scoring that only compares people with the same initial position and that is weird both for the tournament and for elo scoring.