2012-01-13 Dominion is a great game. When I first heard about it, I knew, it would be exactly the kind of game I like. But I didn't buy it then and forgot about it for some time. Now a friend got it for christmas and we played one evening (and night!), two weeks ago. That got me hooked! As it will take two more weeks until I'll meet her again to play Dominion, I searched for some other way to play: Online. Brettspielewelt is the popular choice, but it requires Flash or similar stuff, that I don't want to have on my system. But via dominionblog.de, I came across the unofficial version, make by Falke. The current version 4 [0] provides multi-player matches, by requiring only HTML 5 and JS. That's something I can take. But playing online against people wasn't really satisfactioning me. Most of them were much more advanced than I and liked to play with all the extensions, whereas I wanted not more than the basic edition. And generally, I don't like to play online, too much. Fortunately, there's also Falke's older version 3, [1] which pro- vides bots and therefor single-player matches. And even better: The sources are available. [2] Thus I went for it. I didn't even need PHP and MySQL, as I had expected, but it is all JS. I could readily play in the browser. Well, browser technologies are something I dislike often, but in this case I was happy to have them. Of course, the game had been developed on a Windows system, but by being written in VB, for instance, I wouldn't have the possibility to use it. I enjoyed spending (too many!) hours with the game, just fighting bots, which was a hard enough challenge for me, until now. Then I took a look into the sources, because I wanted to speed up the animations, or possibly remove them completely. The code is ... ugly! Oh my! I am truly grateful to Falke for programming it and even more for putting it online, but nonthe- less, the sources are ugly. Okay, that's actually the way things should go: Someone starts and puts it online, then someone else improves and puts it back online, then ... I'm sure I could cut the code to 1/3 by only using better data structures and reading the static data from some external text file. And although I don't usually do this JS ``dynamically change contents of the web page'' stuff, I believe I could im- prove on exactly this part, because that's the one I think is worst. I'd love to do some work here. Being it only for the fun of it. Maybe I should first take a look at the version 4 code, it could already be improved there. Unfortunately, instead of spending nights, playing dominion or having fun with the code, I really need to do important work for masqmail and mmh these days. I'll try not to forget about this dominion single-player code and im- prove it when I have more spare time. [0] http://dominion.johannes-gaechter.de [1] http://falke.bplaced.de/version3.html [2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/domstrasim/ http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke