Anyone else notice the card that comes up when it’s your turn first? Nearly always a face card.. every 10th one is an A,2, or 3... nearly never a 5-9. I’ve got about 120 games in (60 on the “hard” level). I’m batting around 60%, but it takes some quick work in the first 3 turns of the hand or it’s time to start dumping your highest cards. AI knocks quickly.... too quickly... too often. The deck is rigged as well. Throw away a 9 and two come off the top of deck right away. This happens very often. As others have previously stated, the best strategy is to undercut AI. It’ll knock ASAP in “hard’ setting. Recently, I came back and won after being down 10-95. AI knocked twice (in a row) before I drew a card, but I undercut and knocked my way back. TIP: if you get deadwood to 5 or less, go for gin or Big Gin. It doesn’t, so you should. Developers should not have it auto arrange melds like it does. They should also not call it AI. I just learned the game and haven’t tried all the apps out there, but I’m giving this rating of 2 stars for the obvious rigging. If you can’t build a proper computer program, don’t call it AI and stack the deck.

The first problem, you should be able to manually move your cards around. But you can’t. There was an instance where I should’ve had Gin and the program did not see it. The computer tells you if you have gin, I had no choice but to knock. Even though I had Gin. I have a screenshot. Another problem is, if you have two runs going, with two different suits, and you pick up a card. The program then rearranges them to sets (ie 777 and 888) which may be the best for points value. However maybe that’s not the route I want to go, because of cards that have been let go or cards that I know are dead in the pile. And when that happens you have no idea what the card was that you just picked up, it’s not highlighted or anything so you have to sit there and mentally sort through the cards trying to figure out what card you want to discard. And the final problem which I just saw the AI do, Was he had three or four of the nine’s, and then he started discarding them? Because I had discarded them so I knew when I let go of the third one, oh shoot he’s going to have three nines. He picked it up, and then later started letting the nines go. OK well you could say maybe it didn’t go with this hand, well I called Gin and There was no reason for him to let those 3 nines to go. The next highest card he had in his hand was a six. And he only had one set of melds. So basically you’re playing with an idiot and 9 times out of 10 you should be able to knock or call Gin before it.

There are huge flaws in the system. The computer draws far more cards than any rational player in an effort to amass low point cards in order to knock. In this game, you can always knock with ten or fewer points and an under knock is over rewarded with 25 points. When I play real Gin, we use a second deck to determine what the maximum knock point total will be in this hand and award only 10 points for an underknock. The key to consistently beating the game (65% of the time when set to hardest) is not to knock when you can and try to lower your unmelded point total while waiting for the computer to knock. I win most games by underknocking the computer, something that should be rare. More significantly, I have never been under knocked by the machine after playing thousands of hand while I underknock the machine thousands of times. Finally, the biggest issue is that it has redealt me the same card that has previously been discarded; there is no integrity to the game. It also seems to frequently throw a card that you could have used until your last discard; seems programmed to taunt you. A well designed game should show you the remaining cards in the deck after someone wins the hand to prove the cards are really available. So why do I still play? Because I win even on the hard setting.

This is one of the best gin rummy games I’ve been able to find in the App Store. That being said, it’s pretty easy to game the computer into losing every time even on the highest difficulty. If you are more aggressive about getting rid of high value cards then you are about trying for melds in the 9-K card range, typically you will pick up some medium value melds along the way and end up with pretty low dead wood. Then rather than trying to go for gin, if you get rid of your highest value card every turn your dead wood will almost always be less than 7 by the time the computer knocks. This means maybe 65% of the time you win the hand through undercutting the computer and get 25 points plus the difference in your deadwood. The computer almost always knocks before getting gin so the other outcomes are the computer wins the hand but only gets the difference in deadwood (which should be a relatively small amount) or if the computer gets a good hand and knocks early you might lose the hand by a lot but you will almost always win the game through undercutting. I haven’t lost yet. But the reason I say all this is really to let the developers know cause I hope they improve the AI. Any human player would learn to stop knocking and letting the other player undercut them.