Ace of Spades

No, not this Ace of Spades (though that is a rockin tune). This is Spades of the card playing kind.

And I rocked it.

After thoroughly dominating the Hearts game and then the Bejeweled game on my iPhone, I figured the next game was Spades. It didn't take me long to start dominating, but as more updates and versions of the game were released, the developers started adding new features, new game modes and harder AI competition.

My first goal was to crush the AI opponents. The game had tiers, and so my goal was to pair up with the weakest-level partners and then beat the players with the highest skill rankings. Once I had that done, the more challenging effort began: winning at all the various Spades modes of play the game offered.

The game had traditional, which was easy enough to conquer. Next was Suicide, a mode where one player has to go nil each hand. This was by far the most difficult to win at because the way the hands play out there is almost zero skill involved, which means you're just following the cards. Next was Mirror, where a player has to bid as many trump cards as he holds. Finally was Wiz, which meant you had to choose between going nil or mirroring your trump.

After a month or so of playing, and winning pretty handily, I decided to have a little Spades Olympics, where I would play four rounds of all four modes and play them all from the start until I went undefeated in all of them in one setting. It took almost two weeks of off-and-on playing because that damned Suicide mode would be the biggest pain in the ass. But once I finally nailed that one, I blew through the others with relative ease. Shit, just check out some of those stats. I won 35 nil bids, that takes skill, folks.

Now that I've slated the Spades beast, I've moved on to Euchere, another fantastic card game that all my Cincinnati friends taught me. The app version doesn't have as many options for me to track good competition, so don't hold your breath for a post on this one.

One more time, because it rocks, and Kelly and I tore this song up on Rock Band (because we're dorks).