After discussing some discordianism with 
tyrsalvia, she pointed me to 100 Blank Cards, a delightful discordian game.
When Cate and I are upstate next week, we should play this, and let Dennis keep the stockpile for his birthday.
And I think I want to make an internet based version of this game... it'd be heelarious. The forum from hell... anyone want to help implement this? I've got server space that runs perl and PHP. It's somewhat simple, yet terribly complex. It'd be the dumbest thing to do on the Internet.
tyrsalvia, she pointed me to 100 Blank Cards, a delightful discordian game.When Cate and I are upstate next week, we should play this, and let Dennis keep the stockpile for his birthday.
And I think I want to make an internet based version of this game... it'd be heelarious. The forum from hell... anyone want to help implement this? I've got server space that runs perl and PHP. It's somewhat simple, yet terribly complex. It'd be the dumbest thing to do on the Internet.
Points would be easy to do so long as people stuck to real numbers. The deck and hand manipultions would also be fairly simple.
Special effects, regex's could handle scanning for some common ones, and key words like "destroy" "all" and type of card... With enough time to code it, regex's could also handle common misspellings, or a rule could be handed down that spelling mistakes create another class of items. In any event, doing this would require restricting creativity, and would require precisely specifying those effects it does let you do. But you could get a fair amount of flexibility, more than most games. Writing AI code for a computer player would be a bitch though. At least games like chess its possible to brute force the problem to some extent... brute force wouldn't work where the rules can change so much from game to game and even turn to turn.
Artwork would go out the window.
Alternately, you could go with an SQL database to hold peoples card designs, a perl script to create the cards, deal them, and perform the various administrator duties, and a chat room or message board to actually play the game where you can hash out rules on the fly for interpreting more creative special effects than an automated system could handle.
Advantage of full automation- possibility of computer players(but don't ask me to code that AI), and probably faster turns since you won't be negotiating exact effects, the program does that for you. Advantage of forum with game admin functions only automated, you get a lot more flexibility.
On the flip side, it wouldn't be too difficult to code various "functions" that cards can perform. Maybe make a simple scripting language so people can code-their-own. Then you could open it up to a panglobal game of chaos.
It's hard to embody chaos in computers, but when you involve people, it's always possible.
This reminds me of the time I invented rules for shuffling a fluxx deck and a magic deck together, and playing that.