Got your Poker faces on? Good, because you won’t need ‘em here. So basically when you play poker you create hands of five cards, a pair, two pair, three-of-a-kind (three of the same number, 2 unmatched), straight (ie straight set of sequential numbers with different suits), flush (five cards of the same suit), full house ( 3 of the same number, and a pair of a different number), four-of-a-kind, and a straight flush (five cards in sequence, of the same suit), and royal flush (means the 4 highest cards of the same suit in sequence, and 1 ace also in the same suit). Whew! that was a lot to say, er type.
Anyways, Poker Squares is a game using poker hands. It’s sort of a solitaire game, but can also be played competitively. Basically it’s a grid of 5×5 squares, and you get 25 random cards, and you attempt to arrange the cards into poker hands in the grid. When the grid is filled up, your points are tallied. There are two point systems, American, and English. The American point system, points are determined by actual poker hands, whereas, the English system relies on the probability of getting certain hands in the game. To win you must get at least 200 points in the American system, or at least 70 in the English system.
Points are awarded as follows:
Stephen M. Bennett has brought this game to Xbox Live Community Games. You can play up to four people simultaneously on screen, or yourself and up to three AI players. You can also play this alone without any AI. Each game can be a speed game as well with different time limits. There are five AI levels, easiest, easy, medium, hard, and hardest. In the trial mode I could only play the same hand over and over, however that was well enough to get an idea of how the game is. In this XBLCG game you can also do both kinds of point systems.
The menu layout is quite easy to read, and is pleasant on the eyes. Behind the menu and game screens floating spades, hearts, diamonds, and clovers (okay they’re called clubs, but I just had to put in the Lucky Charms cereal references. Sorry but there’s no purple horseshoes.) On each row and column of the game grid are numbers representing hand points. When all cards are dealt the scores are tallied up. To put the current card into position simply use your D-Pad, or left thumbstick. Hit A to set the card down. Once it’s down it’s down until the next game.
The graphics are pleasant to look at, as I said above. The playfield has this sort of wood paneling look, and the background is as I said above. Green background, with the symbols for each of the suits floating around. The sound effects are fine, and the music is classical piano. All-in-all a pleasant diversion.
Final Analysis: A fun diversion.
Name: Poker Squares
Developer: Stephen M. Bennett
Price: 200 MSP / $2.50 USD
Where you can get it: Xbox Live Community Games. on the Xbox 360
Tags: Cards, fun, game, games, independent, Indie, review, reviews, xbla, xblig, xbox, xbox live, xbox live community games