Pinochle HD

Why this AI refuses meld I do not understand. The AI takes the bid, I send the AI a marriage in spades (the trump that the AI called) along with two Jacks of Diamonds. Then the AI sends the two Jack of Diamonds back and ends up with a total meld of 190, instead of the 490 it could have had!!! The AI does this EVERY TIME I send good meld to it and refuses to send me a Jack of diamonds when I call diamonds trump and we end up with a single pinochle instead of a double run in diamonds. Something is really wrong here!!! Review part two: as incredible as the AI refusing meld, it also wastes aces. When I lead an off suit ace and the opposition has two or one of the aces, my AI has an ace and a ten, the AI plays the Ace! Great, I get ten points, wow who! Then I play a king and the player to my left beats it with his ten leaving my partner (the idiot AI) to follow it a ten BECAUSE the idiot sluffed it’s ace on mine!!! Review part three: three time now the AI will lead an off suit 10 and lose the trick then I find out it had two aces that it could have played. This app is frustrating in the extreme. But wait, it gets better. The opposition bids and plays brilliantly, go figure.

I've played about thousand games of Pinocle with this app, I don't play much else except Tetris to pass idle moments. I do enjoy it overall, and also agree with most of the negative reviews. After a while it's easy to predict what your partner will play though it's often nonsensical. I rarely yield the bid to my partner, and it's best to be aggressive in bidding. My main complaint lately is that the game forces you to use trump if you can't play the given suit. I like to yield to my partner in the middle of the hand to allow him to play his Aces. It's disruptive if I can't throw some trash down and must pick up with trump.

Well, I have played this game for years so feel qualified to review this app. Here is my assessment. Mechanically, the game has played without abnormally ending fairly well now for the last year. The problems that I have seen are relative to my partner's tactics or unfair distribution of cards. There are times when you are playing a passing game, that your partner will not support your hand. For example, you need a Ace for a run, you have the bid, your partner has both Aces in the trump suit and yet will not pass either one to you at a time when it did nothing for his hand. In other situation where you need your partner to keep and play his Aces because you got stuck with the bid and you are short of cards to take tricks, he throws his Aces away as points on your lead rather than to keep them for strategic play. One other situation worth mentioning is when your partner gets stuck with the bid. There have been enough times now that this has happened and the suit that your partner calls trump just happens to be the suit that he only has a few cards in and turns out the your oppenents not only have most of the trump suit but the hightest cards in the trump. ...and you then say "huh?", okay perhaps something less polite. As far as distriubtion of cards, 90% of the time, your opponent to your left will hold all the Aces distributed to them for the hand. This happens way to much for this to be coincidence. Statistically, I would expect over time both opponents to hold equally strong hands. This has not held to be true. I have stopped playing the passing game. I would recommend a hot send button so that when you have these scenarios as described, you push it and it sends to the developers your holdings, biddings, and play for examination and correction of logic.