The Playroom is a free online gaming platform, especially made to be accessible to visually impaired people.
Anyone can connect ! 16 142 players around the world are already waiting to play with you, in 6 languages, and at anytime of the day and night. Join us now ! At the moment, there are 177 connected players and 97 open tables.
Today, the web client is modernizing, as well as the whole website. This is the first part of a bigger and more ambitious update, which, we hope, will follow before 2018.
Main changes to the web client:
Equally as in windows client, a real history as well as channels and views are now also available on the web client
3 volume levels are now settable: music/streams, normal sounds and notification soudns; last ones will make sense later
Improved stability of speech with VoiceOver, on Safari iOS, Safari MacOS and Firefox iOS
Improvements for Firefox and Crhome PC (windows and linux)
For sighted people, a few disposition/display options are available
Definitely stopping support of Internet Explorer 6 to 10, which was anyway quite compromized
Removed reading mode with browser speech synthesis, which was anyway quite limitet, and now low interest since speech is better managed width VoiceOver
General changes on the website:
You can now choose your timezone, date and number format, under options>display options. This also affects dates displayed in windows client, most notably on forum and permanent messages
Improved input help and nickname autocompletion in web forms
Various CSS updates
Our team worked well for this update, but we don't have all possible configurations that you can have as users. There are certainly still bugs. WE invite you to post them here in case.
Thank you for your collaboration on bug reporting, and have fun on the playroom!
7 years ago, your favorite gaming platform was started for the firs time on a small and modest server. At the time, there was only a single game and one could count the number of players on the hands of the administrator team. It was the beginning of our great adventure; the one which, since that time, fill us with wonder as much as you.
There was quite a lot of adventure: thousends of bugs, capricious and even phantom connections, only half-working new games, and a version 1 quite limited.
Then the small and unruly baby grew and progressively became a child and a teenager: version 2 came up, solid teams of administrators, translators, helpers and quiz validator-corrector have been formed, connections statilized, many new games have appeared, we became an international and multilingual phenomenon; and then also came the forum, private messages and the tournaments.
It makes 7 years today that everything began. Is the playroom now an adult? One could easily think so: if the activity of the players never stopped and even still grows day after day, the central core of the nest seem on its side to have fallen quite asleep these last two years.
Asleep? Really? In fact, no, not at all!
If there are no breaking news today, it's not because we felt asleep on our laurels; really not! No, no, the central core of the nest doesn't sleep. Even if they stay quite discreet, a few precursory signs shouldn't fool you. In truth, since several weeks now, we are bubbling in excitement!
However, instead of proposing you something that isn't totally finished, full of bugs and that may leave you on your hunger, as we already could have done it more or less cluncily in the past, this time we have decided to wait. When the time come, when we are ready to present you true news, will then come the great event of all delights. At the moment though, it appears to us that it's far too early.
Seven years, age of reason? Wouldn't be that age at which we accept finally to wait for the right moment, instead of falling childishly under the day of all whimes?
With a slight delay, the easter rabbit visited us on the Playroom.
Beside eggs in black chocolate we particularely like in the team, just like some others prefer white ducks, two news of great importance appeared:
Rummy got an important lifting, and proposes now several new options to give you more various games: three game modes (traditional, normal and challenge); manipulation of combinations already on the table similarly as the plastic tiles version of the game is like; a new combination type, identities; artificial intelligence of bots which improved a lot; and of course the usual old bug-fixing session. For more information, you can look at the update summary page and the rules, which have been updated as needed.
The Playroom is enriching with the addition of a new language, German ! From now on, you will indeed be able to play your favourite game in Goete's, William Tell's and Einstein's language. At the moment, the website, the windows client, and six games are translated, rest will progressively arrive. Applauses and a great thank to Mario, who is already working a lot since some time to allow us this release.
Enjoy these news, and don't eat too much chocolate !
A new game appeared on the list this afternoon, Ninety nine. Its goal is to reach a total of 33, 66 or 99 but without never going beyond. Rules are already available in all four languages by clicking on the link above, so read them carefully before playing, you have no excuse.
We hope you enjoy playing this new game, and see you next time for more news !
The playroom team wishes you merry christmas, and is very happy to present you his new feature: a message system !
This new messaging feature will allow you to send messages that will be much less ephemeral than PM. The later wont nonetheless disappear, because they still remain extremely practical for quick and spontaneous communications; your inbox is an excellent complement to this, which will be very useful to send messages that should be kept, or for moments when your recipients aren't online.
By default, you can only send messages to your friends. You might modify that setting and decide to accept messages from anyone by going under your privacy settings, but we discourage you to do it as you could become flooded.
It is possible to send a message to multiple recipients at the same time, up to 5. To do it, just specifiy more than one name in the corresponding field and separate them by commas or semicolons. You can also invite people to a discussion later, there could be up to 6 participants.
May this feature enjoy you a lot; make a good and fair use of it, and happy holiday season to you again.
The playroom web client is now available in beta, for everybody.
Already since a long time, we regularely receive questions to know if one can play on the playroom from a mac, on an iPhone, under linux, or sometimes even from one's TV or fridge.
So we asked ourselves if it wasn't possible, for those who aren't on windows, to play on a common interface. It was of course impossible to begin programming 36 different versions for the 36 currently fashionned systems, first of all simply because of a lake of time, but also because a lake of money, since in order to do that, you must of course buy all these devices, learn how to use them, and find their characteristics and limits.
That's when we though about the web, and especially to HTML5 and javascript in particular; then we started developping the web client using these technologies. Play on the web simply means that we play directly in the web browser, without the need to install anything on your own machine; no setup program, nor the need to go to whatever store to download anything. You just have to go to a particular website, and voilà, you can start playing.
If playing directly in the web browser without the need to install anything seems especially interesting, perhaps even more interesting than installing that good old windows client, in fact, there are also drawbacks. In particular, even if the web interface can be very well designed, it will never be possible to make something more user-friendly than the native client. The complexity of the web media and its quick evolution on one hand, and the perfect integration of scren readers with native system components on the other hand, make it so that, on the web, the result will always remain less easy and less comfortable to use, whatever could happen.
However, we are happy to present our web client today, which will allow you to play on most of the modern connected computers and devices. Please note that it has still beta status. This means that it is maybe not very stable, and that some things may not always well function under all configurations. In other words, many bugs are probably still present; you shouldn't be afraid of that, it's the principle of public beta: dig up bugs, and there is nothing better than you to help us finding and fixing them. we should say that, in web and mobile world, there are lots of different systems and configurations, and we in fact only tested very few of them. The team, and even the pre-beta-testers haven't at their disposal all what you, the users, could ever have in your hands.
I'm happy to tell you that a new game appeared this afternoon on the playroom: Spades. This game comes from United States where it has been invented in the 30s. It is today quite popular over there. To gain a maximum of points or at least to try not to lose too many, the objective is to bet as precisely and as judiciously as possible the number of tricks you are going to take in the round. Don't panic if you don't understand anything, rules are also available.
Have fun on the playroom, and stay connected, a real scoop is going to arrive soon !
