A Bridge App

Hey all,

Just a quick post about an iPhone app I’ve come across.

I periodically search Apple’s App Store for bridge related apps and until recently the only apps I have found have been, well, not that great. They usually have a badly designed interface and are fairly buggy. Being able to acurately choose from 13 cards on such a small screen is a difficult problem to solve. The guys at GOTO Games seem to have solved this problem really well in their FunBridge app. You choose the suit you want to play firstly and the app then displays the cards in your hand of that suit. This really helps aviod the problem of choosing the wrong card because it’s too small to acurately tap it.

As you can probably tell I really like the interface and think the developers have done a really good job with that. The app currently only allows you to play with a computer partner and opponents, and to save space it actually does the processing on one of their servers which means you need an internet connection to play. As you can imagine the computer isn’t that good, it makes some, shall we say, interesting decisions particularly in the bidding and defence, but then, other than Chthonic, I’ve not heard of a good computer bridge player.

In spite of it’s flaws, I’ve found myself playing this quite alot, when I’ve had a couple of minutes to burn I just play a couple of hands on my phone, and if the developers keep working out the bugs this could become great!