10x Software Engineering Card Game: Have fun with friends & prepare for technical interviews.

Hey everyone, I'm Michael but most of my friends know me as Misha. Working on this started with a simple concept - why can't learning computer science & preparing for technical interviews be fun? The current methods, such as grinding leetcode & staring into a textbook, stink. With the creative potential of 8 billion people on earth, this is what we've come up with? The same experience as cramming for your midterms? I believe that learning should be fun & social, like it was when we were little kids. I'm excited to introduce 10x - the card game for software engineers, by software engineers, that allows you to duel against your fellow students or developers by working to solve a common problem such as checking whether a string is a palindrome. After putting together a prototype with pen & paper (and then digitally), and gameplay testing it with friends, I wanted to launch it on Kickstarter to raise funds for printing a set of proper, casino quality playing cards & manufacturing a full game-board that can build on the prototype I put together. Enough of that though, let's jump into how it works! The rules are simple; each turn you each draw 3 cards from the main deck, each of which has a unique method belonging to an Array, String, Object, Map or Set. In addition to those three cards, you draw a Software card each turn, which allows you to sabotage your opponents solution, strengthen your own, or defend yourself. Each turn you can place a max of one card into your solution zone, and can place one card into your 'Flash' zone face-down. The Flash can hold a card you may want to place into the solution next turn, or it may contain a Software card that you may want to unleash on your opponent. You only have two slots in your Flash Storage, so use them wisely. At the end of each turn, you discard the remaining cards in your hand, and wait for your next turn to draw your 3+1. In order to build out the solution, you will need to use the cards from your 'Side Deck' which contain cards that will allow you to perform basic coding operations such as declaring variables, instantiating an empty array, incrementing an iterator, and more. You will need to place these in interaction with the main solution cards, for the solution to count. Once you have found a solution, and implemented it, you say out-loud '10x!' - from here, you walk through the solution with your colleague & explain it through. Each of the 20 question cards included in the base-set have the outlines of the solution printed on the back, including the Time-Space Complexity broken out in Big O notation. Speaking of Big O, that is how you earn points in this game; based on your solutions algorithmic efficiency. Time and Space are graded differently, though Space is worth a max of 10 points while time is worth up to 50. If you are having trouble walking through or understanding the solution, you can use our web application's built in "Score Calculator"'s 'Scan' functionality where you can take a picture of the board-state on your phone, along with the problem you are working on, and our AI agent will help you understand whether or not your solution can solve it, more or less, for at least partial points scored. After a player has solved the solution, the other has 2 more turns for them to be able to arrive at a solution, otherwise they end the round with 5 points. Speaking of our web application, the 10x Card Game offers a full companion experience to the physical card game by including a single-player, 'Solitaire' mode that you can use to practice the game flow. In addition to that, we include a 'kata' mode which allows you to do some more tangible practice coding, as well as a touch-typing tutor that helps you learn to touch type while learning common data structure and algorithm techniques and implementations, such as how to use the two-pointer technique, the sliding window technique, or how to implement depth-first search. However, that is (hopefully) merely the start. With the funds raised from this Kickstarter, if our fundraising goal is met, I will commit to developing the net-code to enable online multi-player on the web application, including WebRTC-enabled chat-rooms that have audio & video chat, to allow people to have full, technical interviews HERE instead of on Leetcode. I mean, what does a technical interview even measure? Sure, it measures your dedication to doing boring drudge work without questioning why, but what a technical interview is really meant to do is to understand whether or not you understand how these data structures interact with each other, and whether or not you are someone who is easy to get along with. A full, multiplayer experience can turn a technical interview on Leetcode into 'hey, let's just play a round of 10x online'. As a special bonus for those who want to support the development of 10x, there is an optional add-on that is a 4-page laminated cheat sheet, to help you bone-up on the algorithms and techniques that will help you solve the problems in 10x. I wanted to give a few closing thoughts on how this game can develop and grow, and the vision that I have for it. - While the primary programming language for this initial product is JavaScript / Node.js, other programming languages such as Python are very, very possible if there is demand for it. - The 15 cards in the 'Software Deck', the event cards that can be used to sabotage your solution or your opponents solution, could be expanded in future 'Expansion Packs'. Additionally, players could choose what cards go into their Software Decks, to allow for different strategies, bringing an element of personalization and style to each player. Playing card games like Magic the Gathering and Yugioh are a major inspiration for me, though I would never get into the 'gambling' aspect of selling trading cards. - Hosting a world championship every year in Seattle to see who is THE 10x Engineer. - Officially transforming the online matchmaking of the web application from just a game, to be usable by companies and startups to help them run their hiring process by substituting Leetcode with a round of 10x. I think, in the best case scenario, the best thing that could come out of this would be a real cultural change in the tech industry where we learn that the best way to evaluate technical talent is not by asking them write some code that AI could do better/faster than they could. It's by understanding who can think about the concepts in a productive way, and understand by playing a round of a game like 10x - does this person seem like the type of person I could get along with if we worked together for 8 hours a day.