History of the Game

 Author: Joshua Kerievsky
Created: October 11, 2000

One day, in the Spring of 2000, I was leading a small group of folks through our popular and intensive Design Patterns Workshop. By this point in the workshop, participants had studied 18 of the 23 Patterns covered in our class. This meant that we were close to realizing one of the workshop's main objectives: to give participants a thorough education in all 23 Design Patterns from the classic book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

That afternoon, while participants studied passages from the next Pattern in the series, I reflected on how each one of them was doing in the workshop. Just then I was greeted by a rather bothersome thought: while the participants and I had spent time during the workshop discussing the classic and not-so-classic combinations of Design Patterns, and how these combinations can help produce simple, flexible and extensible designs, I did not have confidence that each participant possessed a thorough understanding of this important subject.

And that lack of confidence bothered me.

The workshop clearly needed a way to measure what each participant understood or didn't understand about combining Patterns. But how would I do that? After some reflection, I decided that a fun, non-threatening game would be just the right tool.

So I began brainstorming in class, searching for a game that would work. After tossing aside several ideas, I hit upon Poker, the popular U.S. card game. In traditional Poker, players win hands by combining cards in various ways. I simply needed participants to win hands by combining Patterns in various ways. Poker with Patterns?!?!

It was certainly worth a try!

Moments later, I assembled a set of playing cards, explained the new game to the participants and dealt the first hand of Patterns Poker. Twenty minutes later, I was delighted to discover that everyone loved the game! But even more important, the game helped participants review, clarify and retain their knowlegde about Pattern combinations.

And that's the story about how Patterns Poker came to be.

We are now happy to share this game with you. We hope you enjoy playing, and would love to hear about your experiences playing the game.