Throwback Tuesday: ItsYourTurn.com

I was running through my lists of old website logins last weekend, and eliminated a bunch where the sites had long-since disappeared.  I was surprised to see one of the old gaming sites (where I used to spend a lot of my pre-midnight hours) was still up and running.  As far as I could tell, nothing had changed, not the logo or layout or anything else I could recall from years ago.

ItsYourTurn.com is a "turn based gaming" site, where you can play board games and card games with players all over the world by starting a game and then waiting for the other player(s) to take their turns.  When you log in, you will see the list of all games where it's your turn (thus the site name), and click through those turns, then either look for more games to start, or just go to bed.

It was funny so see that I joined in 2004, played over 1000 games, and have not made a turn since Jan 2016.  Most sites will kick you off or disable your login if you don't stay active enough, but this was always a very low-key group.

Back to ItsYourTurn, the thing that always impressed me about them was their considerable library of playable games, many with a range of variations to choose from.  Here is their list of available games.

I'm sure I spent many hours studying their chess variations: Extinction Chess and such.  It looks like the one I played most was High Bonus Jamble, which all these years later, I have no idea what it is ... it turns out it's a Scrabble variation with a 40 point bonus for playing 7 tiles at once.  A lot of their games have neutral nicknames like that, with Boatzee for Yahtzee, which is fair, since Yahtzee was a public domain game for decades before it hit the market with the two or three rule chnages that made it something that could be trademarked.

I lost about 60% of my 100 games of Go, but came up exactly 50/50 on 80 tournament games of Pente.  Though in ladder games, I won 91% of 104 Pente games -- how does that make sense?

Note: I was designing my own turn-based gaming system for a while around 1996-2005.  Mine was written in PHP and MySQL, and was called tuGGer.  It never went anywhere.  I did code a version of my much older shareware Space Tycoon game, and it did work in the turn-based model.  But when it came to getting thousands of players to sign up and dealing with all the comments and tech issues and criticism, I could not see a path forward.  I never could take the dive and go live with any of my little pet projects back then.

What a fun blast from the past.  The screenshot above captures my basic stats.  I am torn between going back and playing some new sessions, or just leaving it this way as a time capsule.