Rationality Cardinality

The web game greatly suffers from the network effect. There's just very little chance you'll get >=3 people to log on simultaneously, and of course, because of this people will give up on trying, worsening the effect.

Maybe we can designate, say, 12:00 AM and PM, UTC, as hours at which people should log on? This will make it easier to reach critical mass.

Spent about 20 minutes playing online, I have some technical notes and general impressions.

Technical (skip this if you're not Jimrandomh):

• The timer feels way too long, especially as people get to know the cards better and don't have to read all of them.
• When choosing card pairs they are displayed in long rows, so for 3 people someone's first and second cards are on different rows. That's very unintuitive. Maybe put the pairs in separated columns?
• When judging, seeing the timing of the cards coming out can skew the judgement, and also makes it easy to guess which card is the control.
• The website works smoothly, well done!

Here are my main takeaways:

• The cards are excellent, a lot of them are either very funny or are doing a good job explaining things quickly. For some, it's hard to tell which :)
• Unfortunately, the jokes that happen during play itself aren't funny at all compared to the cards. A lot of times there isn't a single card that will give a "funny" answer, am I supposed to choose the logically appropriate one instead, then? I wonder if I'd be more likely to buy the best cards as a poster than as a card game.

I'm going to try and invite some non-LW friends to play, see if they like it or run away screaming in confusion.

I've just made a few updates to the online implementation. Specifically:

• There's an in-game chat.
• When waiting for games, there's an option to leave the tab in the background and get notifications when players join and when the game starts. So if other people aren't visiting at the exact same time, you have a better chance of getting to play.
• Private games don't auto-start at 6 players, you can have more if you want.
• Miscellaneous minor bug fixes.

I don't want to play it online. I want the cards! There are services to print sets like this one http://www.meinspiel.de/ (German, but there must be others).

Awesome! I'm glad this is taking off so well.

Regarding getting players, though ... maybe connect it to some other medium besides the web site, such as IRC? Having the same game instance available on the web and IRC would be pretty awesome.

Can you add a way to be notified if at least two people are currently joined?

I've got a few people interested in an effective altruism version of this, plus a small database of cards. Suggestions on how to proceed?