I played a game, got my estimated rating (pretty accurate!), and a modal dialog box offering me the choice of "enter my email to create a account" or "forget me and play again". Immediately my heart sank. It's 2022, I have enough accounts on enough websites to last a lifetime and am super-sick of the whole "we've sent you an email, be sure to click the link to verify" dance.
Most importantly, what I actually wanted to do was get the game out and analyse it. But now the text was no longer selectable so I had to go grubbing around in devtools.
Turns out the "forget me and play again" button just dismissed the popup and didn't actually start a new game but I had no way of knowing this short of playing another test game in another tab.
Suggestions:
(a) don't use modal dialog boxes! Let me create an account in the middle of a game if I want. Let me copy and paste the moves at any time, including after the game is over. Don't have a button to "play again" if it's not actually going to play again.
(b) asking for email addresses annoys the hell out of people. Let me play again without forgetting who I am. If I want my identity to persist across browser sessions then sure, let me create a username and password. If I want to be sure I don't forget the password, sure, let me tie it to an email address. But it should be step three, not step one. Otherwise people will just never come back.
(c) "excited", "Thanks for the game", the eyebrows? It's a bot, it's not capable of excitement or gratitude or facial expressions. Pretending it is seems, well, patronizing. It's reminiscent of chess.com with its cutesy bots (and persistent nagging).
+ 1 to this, I dropped my email, but I really don't want to go and verify it. I'm curious to know what I get after I login, because it's not immediately clear.
Another option is to consider 3rd party OAuth like Google.
I can highly recommend the late David Mackay's _Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms_. To my mind it's a much easier read than the above book.
It may not work in dosbox, but mushroom.ovl is just raw 8-bit[1] linear audio sampled at 8kHz so you can load it up in your raw-audio-capable app of choice. On linux try "aplay mushroom.ovl", for example.
[1] Actually only 6 bits per byte are used; presumably this was done to improve decoding speed or something.
The result is 6 bits of resolution, along with a high pitched squeak during playback, depending on the output circuitry and speaker characteristics (it's less noticeable when a low-pass filter is added).
I enjoyed trying unusual systems, but playing against them were less fun. Sure you can play some advanced relay system, but even with open information about the system needing to figure out exactly how your relay system is built takes away the focus from the core of the game that is enjoyable: Finding the right bid, and then meeting it in play.
