Puzzle Poker

Nice way to kill some free time

⠀

I am 32 years old.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing.

Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side.

With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happiness of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay.

After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like.

Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends.

Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together.

Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

Thank you.

Puzzle Poker is a mobile/Flash like card matching game. The premise is fairly novel, as you make poker hands by dragging columns of cards around to make them match as best you can, then hit "cash in" to collect chips based on the values of the hands you create. It seems like an okay premise for a mobile app or a browser game, but it's unclear why this is on Steam.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game library/engine, Torque3D. It's rarely used, because it's arguably worse than construction kits like GameMaker Studio, RPGMaker and Clickteam Fusion, but it's also much harder to work with. Despite this, Torque3D has very limited capabilities, which go some way to explaining the poor quality of the game. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.

This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).

Regardless, for all intents and purposes Puzzle Poker might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Puzzle Poker has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for collecting 1000 chips, trivial to achieve, but less than 5 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 5 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Puzzle Poker is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Interesting take on matching games. Although you'll need a fair amount of luck for one of the achievements, I enjoyed having to strategize in order to achieve it.

I appreciate that the dev listened to players and made the achievements less grindy (and no longer impossible).

It's a simply game with some good fun to it, and it's at a fair price for what you get.

I already own several other poker games such as video poker games and Texas Hold 'Em games, and this is a nice variation of poker that is quite different than my other games. Plus, I bought it on sale for less than $1. I just tried seeing which puzzle games Steam recommended to me based on the games I already owned and this was the only good game I could find.

puzzle poker is by same guy who made the incredible machine, but this is just a simple card/matching game. a bunch of cards are laid out, you can move both rows and columns to create the best possible poker hands and don't even have to let go of the mouse button to change directions, which is nice. what's more, cards don't have to be in sequence, so 3 queens anywhere in a row or column will count as a three of a kind.

4 game modes are available, though it's really just 2 with some difficulty options. chips mania is essentially a fast-paced matching game and annoying not only because of the timer but all the chips flying around noisily when you make a hand and cards are replaced by new ones. an untimed version would've been a great addition, as well as a toggle to remove the chips.

in casual game, still with a timer and a tutorial, cards don't disappear. instead, you have 5 boards (turns, if you will) to organize cards in a fashion that will earn enough total points after cashing in each board. this mode has a couple of hints and a super hint per run, use them wisely. let's call this normal mode. challenging game is the same, but with 4 boards instead of 5 and higher score requirements, so hard mode. unlimited time is once again casual but without a timer, you can even go on to the next level after failing to reach the goal for the current one, so it's easy mode.

graphics are what you'd expect, music is jazzy, sounds are annoying. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the main menu button not only pauses the game, but saving during and between levels or boards is possible, so you can continue your runs later. there are also online leaderboards for some competition.

only separate volume sliders and a full screen/windowed toggle, but resolution is 1024x768 no matter what, so everything will be stretched on a widescreen monitor (so every monitor these days) and it might mess up other open windows. despite the date on the store page, the game is from 2006, but a few resolution options would've gone a long way. unskippable end-of-level animations while the game slowly reveals all the stats are also annoying.

if they'd prioritized basic functionality over meaningless achievements and a twitter pop-up and icon when putting the game on steam 10+ years later, it would be easier to recommend. it still works (mostly), so poker people might want to check it out on sale.

Sliding cards across the table forming hands of Poker.
Fairly simple until trying to fit the last card against a perfect combination.
Few modes to play with, scores to obtain or beat.

Was fun at first, gradually dull, boring repetitive.
Chasing achievements, all else are possible by grinding a thousand hands or a Million chips
' until '
the ridiculous 8 K hand achievement.
Despite 66 hrs and over 3000 hands of games,
The odds of a natural hand of two Royal Flushes, accompanied by two three Four of a Kinds are basically impossible or close to 0%.
Could be rolling hands for my remaining thirty years and still might not happen.
2.2% of achievers have the achievement, like real as
' noone ' in the Casual, Challenge and Unlimited Mode Leaderboard even crossed 8K.

Another game to stain my list of Completed games.

Not Recommending due to accumulated fustrations and failure to deliver a completed game.

When you play the game for a certain period of time, you understand its logic and teaches the game is not a waste of time.

If you look hard enough on Steam, you can always find a hidden gems. Puzzle Poker is one such gem. It is like video poker. You try matching cards in order to get flushes, 4 of a kind, full house, etc. Not being much of a poker player, I found this game very addictive and easy to learn. Good graphics, music is ok, and loads of fun. 10/10.

This is a mild recommendation in the game's current state.

The good: Like all of the best card games, this is a fun, budget-priced time waster with a simple but clever mechanic. You scroll a 5x5 board of playing cards horizontally and vertically to try and make the best possible poker hands. You get an individual score for each row and column. There are two timed modes (Casual, Challenging) where you get a set number of boards to obtain a goal score with that goal getting higher with each level. There's an untimed mode that works the same way but without a time limit (helps you learn the tricks for achieving higher scores) and a "Mania" mode which is timed and auto-scores the board as larger point values are accrued. The game has global leaderboards for each mode,

The bad: Very barebones in regards to options. Not expecting FoV sliders or 4k textures or anything in a $3 card game but the current options menu is Windowed/Full-Screen and two audio sliders (to get rid of the monotonous music or the sound effects). All this would be fine but the game is currently limited to one resolution (1024x768?) and while you can put it in full-screen, it looked stretched and bad on my 16:9 monitor. This doesn't bother me much as this is the kind of game I'd like to be multi-tasking in the background with anyway but in this day and age, even a budget-priced game should have some degree of scalability.

All that said, I see the developer is active in the discussions and hope he/she will continue to work on it to iron out the current issues. I've already gotten my money's worth.