Simple Card Game in Python

Question

After finishing up finals, I wasn't really working on coding for a while. I decided to write a card game to get back into the programming scene. I'm just wondering if there's anything that I missed or could be improved upon.

import random
suit_choices = ("Diamonds", "Hearts", "Clubs", "Spades")
suit_picked = random.choice(suit_choices)
number_picked = random.randint(2,9)
while True:
 print suit_choices
 user_card = raw_input('\nEnter a suit to pick from. Your choices are listed above. ').title()
 if user_card == suit_picked:
 print '\nYou guessed the suit type correct!'
 user_number = input('\nNow pick a number card (2-9) ')
 if user_number == number_picked:
 print '\n You guessed the card number correct!'
 break
 else:
 print '\nShucks. Try again.'
 continue
 else:
 print '\nOH NO'
 continue

• Ray: correct -> correctly

Answer 1

There are a couple of things I'd say you're currently missing:

1. A way to quit;
2. Input validation; and
3. Scoring.

---

At the moment, your while True will run forever. It is not unreasonable to think that a user might eventually get bored! Therefore you could add something like:

if raw_input("Play again (y/n)? ").lower() == "n":
 break

To the end of the main loop.

---

Your game will fall over if the user enters something for the "card number" that can't be evaluated. Also, they can enter something that isn't a suit. As @otus points out, you shouldn't use input; I would suggest you add more validation. This SO community wiki will be useful to you, you should end up with something like

user_card = get_str_input('\nEnter a suit to pick from. Your choices are listed above. ',
 suit_choices)
...
user_number = get_int_input('\nNow pick a number card (2-9) ', 2, 9)

Where those functions only ever return valid input and catch any associated errors.

---

You're making a game; why not tell the player how they're doing? The simplest way would be something like:

right = wrong = 0

then += 1 to the appropriate value each time through the loop. After they quit, show something like:

print "You got {0} right and {0} wrong".format(right, wrong)
if right > wrong + 2:
 print "Well done!"
elif right > wrong - 2:
 print "Not bad"
else:
 print "Bad luck"

---

Also, card games lend themselves very well to OOP; you could have Card, Deck and Game classes, for example:

class Game(object):
 def __init__(self, suits=None, faces=None):
 if suits is None:
 suits = ("Diamonds", "Hearts", "Clubs", "Spades")
 if faces is None:
 faces = range(2, 10)
 self.suits, self.faces = suits, faces
 self.deck = Deck(self.suits, self.faces)
 self.deck.shuffle()
 self.score = {'right': 0, 'wrong': 0}
 def main_menu():
 ...
 def _input_suit(self):
 ...
 def _input_face(self):
 ...
 ...

• otus: Re: OOP, I think it's also important to know when not to use OOP. If the idea here is to learn/refresh Python/programming knowledge, then sure, a class for cards is fine. If this was a practical application, though, OOP would be sort of overkill when the only operations needed are an initializer and equals.
• jonrsharpe: @otus I agree, I was going from the OP's comment on trying "to get back into the programming scene". This particular game is easily achieved without OOP, but OOP could help abstract to a whole pack (sorry) of card games.

Answer 2

 continue

Both your continue statements fall back to the end of the loop anyway, so they are redundant.

---

 user_number = input('\nNow pick a number card (2-9) ')

In the other place you correctly used raw_input. The difference is that input executes the given string as an expression, which is seldom what you want (and usually unsafe).

---

Nothing else really. The \ns at the start of all your strings are a bit ugly, and some people prefer using empty print statements to indicate extra empty lines.