Making a Buttery-Smooth Card Game Experience

Hi! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hey everyone, I’m Jimmy Dickinson, the creator of Cards JD—a place where you can enjoy many classic card games, such as Cribbage, Speed, Spades and more!

I used to work in a corporate environment, but I’m now a full-time indie game developer! Card games aren’t the only things I do, as I’ve also created educational apps, like Reading Buddy and math games.

What are your favorite games to play?

DOTA is a game I've been playing for years. I mainly play that to keep connected with my friends and family. I should be really good at that game by now by the hours I've put into it, but even now I feel as though I’m still just fairly decent. But it's a good social game, really, and I pretty much enjoy any multiplayer game. I don't know why I don't like single-player games, but I love competitive games.

Outside of computers, I love soccer, I play on adult teams and I coach a couple of kids’ teams.

How did you get interested in games?

So we've always had an Apple //e, an Atari and a Nintendo. I learned to play on those and then I always just wondered how people make them. Then one day I was sick, around I think grade school. I just stayed home and I found a help file for QBasic and read it and just started coding and creating a simple old game that's based on Tron. Like I said, I love multiplayer games, so I built that game to be multiplayer; allowing four people to play on the same keyboard. I come from a family of 13 kids, so everything is always multiplayer.

That got me started and then through grade school and middle school, it's just a hobby. I just kept learning other languages, Pascal and so, and just kept trying stuff. I made it all the way through my college degree without really even getting paid for any of it. But I just kept doing it as a hobby.

Flash came around. I think I was a little bit late to that, but that was an awesome run. I finally got paid for one job, but that was actually for animations. And it wasn’t my forte. I'm more of a programmer, but I dabble a little bit on the art side too. 

As someone who’s primarily a programmer, I think I'm a decent artist.

Growing up with 12 siblings

The first six of us were very competitive boys. You got Street Fighter II. We'd all line up, fight each other, winner stays and fights the next one. Mario Kart was a big one. And then I would figure out how to get the two computers to talk to each other. Warcraft was awesome. We could get that going back and forth. That's how I learned to start doing the networking stuff and the games just drove me to learn IT stuff.

But programming, I really fell in love with that. I think I figured out how to make my first computer player that was decent in high school, during English class. I would build games on the calculators, so yeah, that's where my focus went during school.

Personal history

I had a physics class back then, so I would just write all the formulas and make my own UI for it. And I think by doing that I learned the formulas by creating the program because you had to troubleshoot it and learn all the details. In early college, I was doing computer science while also studying abroad. Half the time I was gone in different countries. Eventually I ended up with Latin American studies because I had all the credits done, and so I got most of computer science done and also business. I took on business because I always wanted to run my own business. But it took another 10 years to figure that out. 

During my undergraduate, I took on a Flash job for education software. I’ve said I'm not a strong animator, but I'm strong enough to build tools to animate. So inside of Flash I built this puppet tool. So basically I could create the character and then connect it to the mouse going up and down to animate one way and go side to side to animate a second timeline. And so then I could listen to the audio and then make a move and I would just record it.

So yeah, most of my history is just me playing to my strengths and that was cool.

Learning business and being an entrepreneur

My dad's an electrician and he's always run his own company. He's had either zero to a few employees. And so I’d seen that and I guess I never saw the corporate world growing up. Even though I dove into it for about 10 years, I've always tried to figure it out. I've done door-to-door sales for like four or five years during college. I realized it's something I don't want to do, but it paid the bills.

Back then, I did pest control and so I think I know every door in the San Jose area for up to 20 miles and all the way to San Francisco. I have this weird memory though. I don't remember people's names, but I remember their pets' names. And so I will go up and I'll remember their pet and because we'll get started.

Anyway, that just taught me a lot about hard work. But from the business side, I've tried to do a little bit of contracting here and there. Every time I would do that, I would undercut myself because I cared more about the project than the pay. And so that was never sustainable. Eventually, I went with a consulting company and then they deal with all that and then they just have to hold me back from doing too much work because somebody's got to pay for it. Because I have a passion for a project, once I get on it, I just want to solve that project.

But as for the entrepreneur stuff, it's. I just build projects all the time. I love solving problems. So I have tons of solutions to tons of problems. I just never monetized on it.

Can you tell us about the time you made a game with your brother?

My brother had a project, and it was for Windows Phone, and I am always going to credit him for that. I still think that was one of the best phones ever released, and it was way ahead of its time. It was low priced, high performance, great dev environment. It had the Metro UI.

The game got featured, and it got number 1 on the Windows Store, so that was pretty exciting. But I have a few other apps from that phase from the Windows Phone. My Windows Phone era was when I actually started making a decent amount of money on the side.

But that was right when Windows Phone was dying and so I had to jump over to Android and take a leap there. I hoped that it would work because I quit my job, and luckily it did.

How hard was it to shift to being a full-time indie dev?

So that actually was one of the hardest things to do full-time because I had a young family back then; two kids, one on the way. I was looking at the timing at this point. I've been building games and I was bringing in $20 to $30,000 on the side and I was hitting the bottleneck. I didn't have any more time.

I had small kids, and I was working at a job full time, but I had to do something. So I slowly just gathered it together and had enough to live off of for one year. And so I took that and sold it to my wife. I said, “Look, you're going to get the same paycheck every month.” and it was just like her other job. And she agreed. 

Then I figured out the insurance. That was another difficult thing. Insurance might be the hardest thing for most people working on their own. I don't know why we tie insurance to businesses, but that's like a golden handcuff.

So I quit working at Intel, I was doing good there, and so I had the runway made with my savings and the goal was to convert what I was doing from Windows Phone over to Android and iPhone. And so there were a lot of unknowns there because I never developed for Android or iPhone. 

And so within that year, I bumped up the revenue. Not all the way up, but at least I was not burning my reserve as fast. And the next year it was a little bit less. And then I finally broke even and started consistently breaking even. It wasn’t much though, we were living off of less than we used to. 

Eventually, it passed it up and then it passed it up more and it reached the point that I had enough that I hired someone full time for a year. I extended it for another six months and I'm actually backing off of that right now because the project we worked on didn't go quite as expected. It's just taking longer to grow than expected.

In the whole activity of putting anything in the App Store, you get zero notice. You don't get any users by putting it in the App Store anymore. You have to fight for every single user now. But there are other avenues out there and so yeah, it's been a good ride and I want to ride it as long as I can.

What was the game that helped you fully transition into your current career?

Speed. It was really one big bet for me and my whole family. The worst-case scenario was I’d lose my reserve and I’d go and get a job again. But Speed really started to kick me off back then.

I like fast-paced games and I like multiplayer games, so that seemed to hit the spot. I think one of my other brothers built a little prototype in it and so giving him the right credit, but it's been rebuilt probably 100 times over since. It's a simple game to make. But to make it good, I would grab any phone I could and test it from my experience because I wanted the game to be as smooth as possible, as quick as possible. And a lot of my work goes into the attention of the performance.

The core game you can build in a week or so, but getting multitouch to work, getting it to flow smoothly… that’s where the finer aspects of the work start. Buttery smooth is always my goal. And a lot of the devices were really slow at that time. I mean, compared to what we have now, they're really slow, not old. And then there's a bunch of little things that go on. As you drag the card, you want it to snap in before this computer does, so you feel it’s fair and so the computer feels more human. I try to make the computers feel as human as possible. And then we built multiplayer on top of that. And I tend to drive every one of my games to multiplayer, whether that's the right business decision or not as it takes easily 10 times the amount of work to make things multiplayer.

I do have the skill set to do that. I'm a strong backend developer and a pretty strong frontend developer, so really, my skillset is full stack. And if you can find that middle ground where you understand the tool sets for the art side and the tools and the coding for the back and converge those, you can be extremely productive. Usually, people go one way or the other. I, on the other hand, do a good job sitting in the middle.

But yeah, I really enjoy making games. I make them on the side. That's how I learn new languages or new technologies. And small games like Speed are very enjoyable to build because you can finish the project on your own. You can do the back, you can do the front, you can do the whole project. And the art side… there's not a lot of art there as that's not my strength, so you just make it look clean. So Speed has a special place for me because it started my business. It still brings in a decent amount of revenue.

How hard was it to learn how to develop for mobile devices?

So I do have Java experience, but I did everything web and so I made everything work through the web. There’s a way you can wrap it all, it's kind of like Cordova. There have been a couple of different frameworks in the past that work this way. All my apps are web-based and that's why you can play them all on my website. You can play them anywhere. Pretty good optimizing for the web.

And so the idea is “Build once, play everywhere” which almost works. In this case, I didn't need to know any Java, I didn't need to dig into it. The toolkit did it for me and the same thing goes with iOS. Nowadays I build some of my own plugins which I have to do natively, and so you just pick it up.

The hard part is getting people to download your apps, and so it's a whole new market. In Android, I had to learn a lot, as they call it ASO (App Store Optimization) instead of SEO to push it up, and the same thing goes with iPhone. I do equally well at both of those, I get about a 50/50 download; one from one, one from the other. 

But frankly, that was the biggest unknown. How to get people to find it and how to get them to play it.

What marketing practices worked for you?

For app downloads with iOS, the title helped a lot. Just keyword stuffing into the title. They don't like that much anymore, but it worked a bit. That's why Speed is still called Speed: The Card Game. Because for years, if you searched “card games”, it would be in the top three. And I assume that is the reason for that. 

And then iOS doesn't have a lot you can work with. There are just some keywords. I try to put them into the descriptions, I try to put them into the update notes. I don't know if that's being read from, but you just put those keywords anywhere and everywhere. You can go to any game forum and stuff it in there. 

I don't know if Twitch existed then, but now, for example in Twitch it's in their game library. So if you stream you can select it as a game. It is on a couple of game portal sites that also help point people to it. I'm sure I lose some revenue from that, but anything that points to it is good. So it's sitting in the top 10 results on Google right now.

How did Cards JD come to be?

So the JD in “Cards JD” is James Dickinson, my name. Probably the least original branding, but I had been needing to brand this for years because it really hit me when Cribbage was doing well on Facebook and I also was doing decent on Android and iPhone. On the forums, people would say, “Hey, that's the Facebook Cribbage!” And so I wouldn't get any cross-platform.

When you say that it’s Facebook Cribbage, someone else will say, “Well, I don't play on Facebook”. So I rebranded it to Cribbage JD and so now when people say they play Cribbage JD, whether they play on Facebook or iPhone or Android or web or the Windows Store, any of it, it all comes back to the same thing. It's an older audience, so a lot gets lost in translation. They just hear Cribbage JD and they type in Cribbage JD to whatever type of device or portal, they find it. So it really worked for branding.

And so I slowly started branding all the other games JD. Well, I put the JD after the game title because I want Cribbage or Speed to be the first keyword. It's not the most unique so it's not the best for SEO, but it has helped. I've been trying to get a branding name for a long time, thinking of one for ten years already. I've been trying to come up with something awesome, but in the meantime, this is functional, it works and it's serving its purpose.

Pragmatism in SEO

So the whole thing with the JD has a slow but tangible effect. So for example, if you search Nertz on iPhone and Android, there's not a lot of competition. And so a lot of my other games have the keyword Nertz in there and JD. So for example, if you search Nertz, you'll see Cribbage come up. Or if you search Cribbage JD, you'll see all my other JD games come up. And that's the idea. And it's slowly working. I don't like the idea, but it works.

It's hard to market. And I could have built all my games and shoved them into one game and said “The Super Game”. I've approached things differently with a hyper focus for each game. Speed has a completely different audience than Cribbage does. And so when I build them as a developer, I should reuse everything I can, but I tend to try to make it better.

There's a lot of competition, and it's not like I'm building something brand new. So I have to build a better mousetrap rather than a unique mousetrap. And so each one gets a hyper focus. And so a lot of it doesn't get reused from one to the other when it could be. And so I brand things like Cribbage, it's just Cribbage and I just focus on making it good. So like Cards JD is primarily for Cribbage at the moment. And hopefully, the magic synergy will come together eventually. And I drive all the other apps that are coming up. That's the ultimate goal. But I still view every single project individually instead of as a big grouping of them.

How do you allocate your time to building new or existing games?

I log every single hour that I do. It's just a Google Calendar. But then it gets pulled into my own analytics. I have my own analytics that I do as well, so I can look back at, “Hey, did I just spend 200 hours or 2000 hours on this?” And then it also pulls in all the revenue and amount of users from it too. And based on that, I say, “Well, that one's not making anything. I really have to stop.”

So every year I look at my whole projects and I give myself a high level of what projects I'm going to do. And every month I have a to-do list. And then from that, I give myself a weekly one that I work on. So basically every month it lets me take one step back, see what projects am I actively working on, which ones are getting ignored, and so on.

And every year I take a further step back and say which ones are actually profitable. So as for time, there is a lot more maintenance time needed than people realize, especially the ad plugins. The ads have to be updated all the time. There are a lot of policies that need to be changed with the app stores. They take quite a bit of my schedule.

But as for time allocation, I try to do all regular business hours on the apps that I've considered that are part of my business. I consider them professional projects. I also have other ones that are hobby projects that will eventually graduate. There's only one exception that doesn't really make any money, but it indirectly brings in users that I finally graduated to my business. And that's tournament software. 

I've been running chess tournament software for a long time… I'm not sure how many years already, but definitely more than a decade. I have a few brothers who each run chess clubs at their respective schools and one of them is kind of the unofficial guru of running tournaments or running clubs. He tends to get a lot of the other clubs and we run these unofficial tournaments. I mean there are state tournaments, but these are unofficial ones we run. And I helped them out doing that.

Running chess tournaments

So we started running chess tournaments and I told myself, “Don't rebuild the software from scratch. Try using what's there.” We tried using it and we hit a bottleneck with 50 players. We can never get more than 50 players. It uses five games as the format, so it would just take too long. So then I'm like, “Well, let me try to do it from the very basic point; an Excel file.”

And then I found all the bottlenecks. I'm like, fine, I'm going to build this software. And I've been building ever since. The biggest bottlenecks were checking people in, reporting scores and so on. Because we had a bottleneck of about 50 people at max. But now we have tournaments of 300 plus kids plus you got 50 to 100 parents sitting there. It's all web-based. It's also the people that report the scores, you just ask a volunteer. It's so user-friendly that they can learn to do it quickly, and you can have up to five people reporting scores at the same time.

And then when people need their seating, an early version would send out a text message to every single player of their seating. So we used to have to put up seating charts, print them on the wall and people would have to all crowd up there and then all find their seats. But now just a message just goes out. Now everybody, around 300 people, just all go find their own spots. Just cleared all the bottlenecks.

So that's been a side project. It's on its third iteration. But then COVID hit and I was working on Cribbage at the time and its online part. And apparently, a lot of people go to Cribbage clubs and it's got a big community. But during COVID all that shut down. And so I transformed the tournament software to be more of an online tournament software. It's really more of a casual tournament software. But the host can stream and people can chat and it will throw you into your room and all that. And so now that's running active. It has probably 10 tournaments a day with 20 to 50 people per tournament in each one.

Improving Bracket JD

Bracket JD may be merged into all my other apps eventually, but it's running as a separate branch right now. So it can iterate a lot quicker. It’s open-ended, and it is the idea, it's a shell around the app as well. So I may add video chat in there, but it's all the tournament stuff except for the game itself. It just runs the game in an iFrame and there's a tiny bit of connection, so it automatically does the scoring. And so that's another level I'd like to add in. 

But all these, it's not about building the app, it's about building the community. I'm trying to recreate what you would do in person. That's how I code most of the UI. And I'm trying to recreate family fun games. Like I said, I grew up in a large family and we would play card games together, and that's what I try to recreate.

It does need a lot more love, though. It's my second on the top of my list always. It's always sitting there, second on the top. There were a lot of shortcuts taken to make it because it was in the hobby category. So there wasn't a proper authentication. And now I have to patch a lot of these because now I have a lot more users. And there's always going to be a few bad actors here and there. And it didn't have the tools in place for the host to manage that. It could be 100% automated, but I purposely want it to be run by people because that's the whole purpose. It's people being around people.

What are some of the challenges of creating a multiplayer game from your perspective?

Quite often the hardest thing is letting people chat. And yet at the same time stopping them from chatting. There's always going to be bad actors, so it's a hard balance there. That opens up a big can of worms and that seems to be the hardest one.

As for the leaderboards, I actually have a little bit of somebody trying to be a hacker on one of my leaderboards right now, and I'm manually fixing it so it makes it look like it's automated. Yes, because a lot of the authentication was very lowkey to almost nothing. Because I built the games originally to be offline, and I still do, by the way, authentication is a big concern. However, if I can make it purely online, security gets a hundred times easier. That is something I'm working on right now, to rebuild the authentication system and the profile system to be more heavily online. And that closes a lot of holes. 

But as for leaderboards, I think that drives a lot of retention in competition. It's a passive competition over time. I love the direct competition playing live, but the leaderboards allow you to be asynchronously competitive. Cribbage right now has a very simple leaderboard. Behind the scenes, I have about 10 other leaderboards. I haven't made them live yet. When I opened up that project, because this is the project I'm doing this fall, I realized I already did all the code about eight years ago. It's sitting there. And so, to this little hacker, I was like, man, good job. And that guy thinks just like I think, it was great. It was just a bit heavy for the server. But now that I have a much bigger user base, it's worth it because, well, I'm monetizing on it.

And so what these leaderboards do, is they let you take in several stats, and then the leaderboards will just give you different views of the stats. Meaning, like with Cribbage, you can win and lose, but you can also win by a certain amount of points. There are a couple different ways you can do it. And so I can have a leaderboard that's just purely based on wins and losses. Right now it's on a rating system, on an elo rating system that chess uses. 

Another one could be the fastest players, another one could be another type of leaderboard. And then it also cuts it by month and by year. And it automatically does all that. I just need to give a couple of UIs to it. And that way you can be a winner in many different ways. But yeah, the elo rating system, it's a great system to find skill. It's not the best system for feeling like you're progressing because it's frustrating because most people don't progress that fast. So what happens is that they get better as they play, but it's a very slow process. But it does a great job against cheating because you have to build up an account all the way up to make it the next account to go up.

If you were to try to cheat the system, it self balances really well. So it has its pros and cons. I do plan on actually updating all the leaderboards for all of the games. The reason why I like that and what's worked well for me with all the games is achievements. They're the simplest thing to add in there, but you can just like you can get creative with them.

Achievements system

So first I just got to pulling stats internally and then from that you just start viewing the stats in different ways. And it's kind of like the way I like playing games. I'm good at games, but I don't have this drive to always win. I have this drive to win in different ways. And so achievements drive you to win in different ways. Like do it this way, or win three times or lose three times in a row. Win with this card at the end. And there are over 100 achievements in each one of my other games and I want to add even more. Some people keep asking them for them and so that drives that.

And the leaderboards are kind of like that as well. I'm trying to take the very basic game and make you want to play it slightly differently, but not change the game itself. Because nobody wants a Speed with different rules. Nobody wants Solitaire with different rules. You can't be competitive if you change the rules.

So I tried to make it as flexible as possible from the developer's perspective. So it's just a simple name and an icon. There's a different icon for each one. I found an icon set for that. But I also tied in coins into the achievement system. And so you don't just get coins by playing more games. You have to actually focus on the achievements. As you play, you'll get more achievements, but you get the coins by getting the achievements, so it’s a system that also awards you items as well.

I do need to add a lot more items to these games, as Cribbage has the most. The Cribbage board is a piece of art. People love different ones and the pegs and the card sets and I want to make those all unlockable by achievements and that's something I'd love to make more in-depth. So when you get the achievements it triggers a certain number of coins. It just gives you a pop-up that says you got that achievement. 

I always put a progress bar on the start page of every game to show your progress of achievements, and that drives them to the idea that “Hey, there's something here! I want to make this progress bar go up.” I even have some games that have a progress bar that just goes up as you play and people love it.

Can you tell us about your monetization scheme?

There are a couple of industry standards of how often you show ads and now it depends on the game. Like Nertz, the game's going to last five minutes or in Cribbage it's going to last around five to ten minutes. And I really don't like ads during the game. I think that completely messes with the flow. And so some of those I just can't show unless it’s a banner one. But I've always had issues with those in the past, this may not be an issue now, but I’ve had them with banners.

Ads have always been the root cause of 80% of performance issues or bugs because they're injecting JavaScript into the ad and my game is JavaScript. So you throw one down, it may cascade to the other. I don't know how isolated or sandboxed they are but so I tend to stick to the three- to five-minute mark. Once you hit a menu screen, if that has elapsed, it'll show it.

Some of the games won't show ads for the first 10 times you play the game because I'm looking to build something else. Card games have a really long retention and have a very long tail. And so like I said, I'm trying to build more of a community and a userbase. And so the pros with ads is I have people that have been playing these games for five to ten years, and I respond to most emails I get and I save them all so I can look up if you've emailed me before, or I can look at your account. And the nice thing about the ads for these games is that people play them for a very long time. So the more they play, the more money I make which is great. That's a good cycle, and the long-term players are the ones I want to satisfy. I want to please, I want to build more stuff for them. And so it's a good cycle there.

I personally don't like ads at all in my games, and I wish I could find a different monetization model. With my kids, I pay for Google Play Pass and none of them have ads and they are only allowed to play games that are on that. But I don't know how to monetize otherwise. I do have in-app purchases, but I don't have a good call to action for them. So it's about 10% or less of what I make, and I make 90% through ads.

I do make some money with the Google Play Pass. I'm in their store now too. And so that's a good model. However, I haven't quite figured out how much those users make compared to what my ad users make. But it's a good experience because there are no ads and that's the ideal experience.

I would like to add a lot more incentives for in-app purchases like custom Cribbage boards, but never pay-to-play. Never. Well, ads in a sense are a payment, but it's kind of like you're putting a quarter in to keep playing. Yeah, that's my view on ads. That's why you don't see them as often. I'm trying to get the players to like the game first before I want a long-term player.

On paid advertising

I have. I've gone on two or three holidays with paid advertising. One year I did put in a decent amount like $20,000 for like November, December and January. Because I always figured I do a little bit of paid advertising, though I only do the low-paying ones. So when those are available it grabs them. So I like to have a trickle coming in.

In the App Store, when every app drops, there are always seasonal drops and if I can just keep it going a little bit, sometimes it'll keep it above the rest. But I don't pay very much right now. My newfound philosophy is I could take that same time or money and just use one of my strengths, which is building things, building tools.

So like Cribbage has a calculator. I just built another domain for that and it gets 20,000 impressions a month. People love it when you put a hand like you put six cards and say, “What are the best two to discard?” I just need to automate that. Or if I could just build tools to help people with stuff that can drive in as much. I have attempted to make playable ads to see if that would be more useful because at the moment it costs over a dollar plus to get a user. I'm not making a dollar per user. I'm making like 10 or 20 cents. So there's a big gap there. 

So it's usually used to prime the pump, to get it going. But paid ads are not sustainable, at least with the methods I've attempted.

How much traffic do you get with your games?

I get less than the App Stores, but it's been building up. I don't get as much. I need to see what I make per user. There are ads there, but I make more on the App Store, either App Store and Facebook as well. Facebook's pretty on par now with the App Store, at least for that one game.

There’s also a new kit coming out for apps, and most of my games are web, so I just hope either Cordova or Capacitor wraps that for me. If not, I just have to dive into it and then it gets pushed to a higher priority. So Cribbage on the web has about 4,000-5,000 daily users, while iOS has 14,000, Facebook has 20,000 and Android has around 12,000. These are the daily users, roughly around 51,000.

There was a point… I think it was Speed… that I had 60,000 users. And I'm like, I went to BYU for school, and that number fills a stadium. There was also one class I had that was a lecture-type set in an auditorium. How many people fit in there? Several hundred people fit in there.

And so I imagine my game because Cribbage has about a thousand people playing online at a time. Which means it's about 50/50 online and offline, that's about 2,000. So anyway, going back where it only had a couple hundred, I would imagine this lecture hall I was in, and then somebody would be up there or everybody would be sitting there playing my game. And then as one guy got up and walked out, another guy came in and sat down. And then somebody was on the stage saying, here's an advertisement. Look at me, make me money. 

I try to make everything digital into what it would be in a human aspect. And so, yeah, I could visualize it that way. I mean, numbers are not intuitive to humans, anything beyond small numbers, you gotta do what you just said. You gotta visualize it in a real experience.

Do you manage your community?

I do manage communities. So going back to these chess tournaments, my brother was the one that got all these schools together unofficially and just created it from scratch. And I would always be the man behind the scenes making everything happen. I never care for the limelight, but I love seeing people use the stuff and it’s all working. And that's a true compliment when they say it's good and they don't tell me directly.

So going to communities, I have a Facebook page that also doubles as tech support. There are a couple of Cribbages out there, and I'm the newcomer. And so I built a Facebook group and I started driving lots of people to it. But I don't know how to manage groups. I've never really done it. And so I had two or three people. I finally asked, “Hey, can you help me manage this?” And so I have a lady running that right now. She manages it, keeps it clean, runs it. I changed that group to be more of just Cribbage in general. Because if it's Cribbage JD, it turns into tech support, turns into venting and that's not helpful.

So I've tried to strip that out, but every month it says, here's the 10 Cribbages. And of course, mine's at the top. I mean, I built a group and it has 20,000-30,000 people in it now, and she runs that. I have the Cribbage tournaments. I have 10-20 hosts running it now, and each one of them ran their own little page, but we have a Cribbage host page, host group. That one's a private one, but someone else runs that.

And so I like building the tools. I build the communities. I get it going. Kind of like with soccer. I have 17 teams, but they're all doing it by themselves. And I give them the tools, give them everything they need. I just enable it. I'm the glue between everything. And that's worked pretty well.

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your games?

You can go to jdsoftwarellc.com, that should have my contact information. If you email me, I will respond, most likely if you're not yelling at me.