Our thanks to everyone who has shared the news about All inPlay’s Holiday sale and helped make this our best Holiday Season ever! We saw the largest single month increase in our membership in years – wow!
Here are a few people who kindly linked to us RE our Holiday fun:
When we first launched All inPlay, we knew people would enjoy playing in special tournaments. Little did we know people would *LOVE* them! Over the years we’ve had dozens and dozens of tournaments of all kinds. Tourneys for each game, tourneys with wacky rules, and many of them sponsored by generous community members.
There is a magic thrill in playing a tournament, in the final hours as things really heat up. What a simple pleasure, and one I’m glad we’ve done so much of.
I am very proud to share that, for the first time ever, All inPlay launched *two* games in the *same* year: word game Loco Locution and now All inPlay’s Black Jack. That brings us up to games accessible to the blind – better yet, that blind, low vision, and fully sighted can play together as *equals*.
I’m also proud to share that this year we also made *improvements to our *existing* games as well:
* Draw Poker & Texas Holden saw improvements to the design of the game tables and betting experience.
* Crazy Eights gained dramatic new gameplay capabilities through the addition of chaining rules.
* The Anagram Game (TAG) gained an expanded dictionary.
2009 was a heck of a year. We hope everyone had as much fun with the new improvements and games as we did making them *grin*.
If you want a modern product to work well, you must embrace constant improvement. At All inPlay we’ve always had an iterative development process. Prototypes go to alpha testers, nearly-finished version go to beta testers, and “finished” versions are never truly finished. By way of example, our Draw Poker game was launched in 2002 and *still* sees significant updates and improvements *every year*.
We learn more, the world changes, and we want the games to be as awesome as possible <smile>. So we constantly tweak and experiment. And the reason people love the games so much is because they tell us how to make it better – and we listen.
Our thanks to everyone who has pitched in with suggestions to make our games better. We couldn’t have done it without you.
NPR did a nice podcast about Poker (in general, not All inPlay‘s) and how it relates to the USA. Any poker junkies out there might enjoy it…
As I write this, the Five Card Draw tournament has just begun. It’s all part of the All inPlay countdown to 2010, a party celebrating the release of Blackjack and this holiday season. The site will be free through midnight on January 1, 2010. Now through December 24th, we’ll be hosting one tournament for each game. After Five Card Draw, we’ll have Texas Hold’em, Loco Locution, Crazy Eights and finally Blackjack.
To top it all off, one of our generous members is sponssoring a Hold’em tournament that will take place from 8 PM till midnight eastern on New Year’s Eve, so come lucky!
Enjoy!
For many years, we have been fortunate to have such a vibrant community. Our members regularly pool donations together to sponsor tournaments that are open to everyone in the community!
We always emphasize “blind and sighted as equals.” But this email reminds us that our accessibility reaches beyond…
“Hello, I am Mimmier, a great grand mother of so many can’t count them all. My son help me get this account for my birthday. So, say Hi to me on the tables and i will tap out a message with these old stiff fingers”
I’ve had the pleasure of playing with numerous great grandparents, now if only I can get my own father to use a computer *smile*.
I just found this amazing email from a long time ago – it still makes me proud…
“What All inPlay has made is blessing for all of us. I recently recovered from a coma. And Honey, the fun I have and all the friends I’ve made help me make it from one breathing treatment to the next. Thank you!”
-All inPlay Member Jody, January 2003.
Wow. Thank you Jody.
All inPlay is more than an online games site, it is a community of people sharing the values of fun & friendship. From the very beginning this was critical to our design – and it remains the centerpiece of All inPlay’s value to this day. Back when I was running day-to-day operations, it was the Community Director role that was my most vital – and often the most rewarding.
It didn’t feel like “work” when I logged onto a table in the midst of a tournament and chatted with people who had been up for nearly 24 hours and felt on top of the world. Are there bugs? Do servers crash? Are there some unpleasant people in the world? Of course – but the vast majority of the time the site *just works* and people get to have fun.
The All inPlay Team Blog 