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12.15.2010

Gryphon Hearts – Wasted potential.


Gryphon Hearts is an IWON card game. If you couldn’t guess, it’s based on the card game, “Hearts.” Only this time there are elves and gryphons!

deal Ooooh!

The concept is neat, but there are quite a few problems with this game. In fact, I found a pretty big problem when I was half-way done with the guide. At that point I realized I couldn’t in good conscience recommend that you play a broken game, but I hated the thought of losing the time I’d put into it. So! This will be a rant/list of what’s wrong with Gryphon Hearts and why you shouldn’t play it. *^_^*

First off, this isn’t a new game.

gryphonmainpage Copyright 2007

If you’re a regular Free2WinGames reader then you know that I don’t care how old a game is, as long as it works and is interesting. But they’ve had three years to fix bugs!

What is this dreadful bug I refer to? Well, in hearts you compete against other players to get the fewest points. The game is over when one person reaches 100 points, and the winner is whichever player has the lowest score.

Most of the time you don’t want point cards. But you can do something called “Shoot the Moon” that changes things. When you “Shoot the Moon” you have to get ALL of the point cards in that hand. If you can do that, you’ll get zero points and everyone else will get 26 points. Like this:

shotthemoon Yay!!! You shot the moon!

That was the first hand. When the game is over you get your IWON score and tokens. Here is my final score for that game. Can you see the problem?

LIES (says I didn't shoot the moon) WHAT?!?!

Yeah. It says I didn’t shoot the moon. In an earlier game I’d thought that I shot the moon and was surprised not to get credit for it. Good thing I paid attention this time!

That’s the biggest problem. Here are a few smaller ones.

1. The cards are hard to see.

For most of this game I had my nose up to the monitor, trying to see whether something was a club or a spade. That’s not good!!

If you click on the pic below you’ll see the actual size of the board.

First round of cards in Hearts Eek!

There’s no way to make the game bigger! You could alter your monitor settings, but I don’t know many people who would do that for a single game. (Unless it was Runescape, or something. ^_^)

In your hand the cards are arranged by suit. Specifically, it’s Clubs, Diamonds, Spades, and then Hearts for last. Usually this isn’t a problem, unless you don’t have any Diamonds or Spades. Then it gets tricky because…

2. Aces are low.

With some card games Aces are both high and low cards. This is not the case in hearts! Here, Aces are always high. Always!! But for some blasted reason, they’re auto-arranged as low.

This threw off my game a lot. I’d think that my highest card in a suit was a King, and at the end I’d see that stinkin’ Ace. Or better yet, I’d think I had the Ace of Clubs and it was the Ace of Spades. GAH!! >_<

it’s all around bad. Bad bad bad!

3. You can’t change your pass cards.

Hearts is played in a cycle of four rounds. The first round you pick 3 cards to pass to the left. The 2nd round you pick 3 cards to pass to the right. The 3rd round you pass to the person in front of you, and on the 4th you keep your cards as they are.

In Gryphon Hearts, as soon as you click a card to pass, you’re committed. You can’t unclick that card! And as soon as you click on the 3rd card the game starts. If you misclick (and I did) then you’re stuck!

 

Final Rating

Despite the glaring problems, I actually had fun playing Gryphon Hearts. *^_^* But would I recommend it to you? Absolutely not. I know there are other free-to-win Hearts games out there, so I’ll keep looking!

This gets 1 star out of 5.

Do you know of any free-to-win Hearts games that you’d recommend?

 

Similar Games

If you like card games, here are a few non-broken ones that you can try!

 

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