Pull up a chair for Deadwood-themed poker
by Christopher Grant 
{ Jun 13th 2006 at 3:45PM }
Deadwood, HBO's stellar, curse-infused western, is returning with their third-season and, as a promotion, they've enlisted Fuel Games to create a browser-based poker game called Dead Man's Hand. As Deadwood is to westerns, Dead Man's Hand is to poker games. The developers describe it thusly:
"Dead Man's Hand is a first-person 3D Texas Hold'em game that allows you to sit down at the table with the characters from the show: Al Swearengen, E.B. Farum and Trixie. But poker with Al Swearengen is a dangerous game, and he's a less-than-graceful loser. You'll need more than luck to get out of the game alive.
"Just like real poker, you can raise, fold, call or pull out your six shooter and start shooting bottles, lamps and the people you're playing against. Just be careful who you point your gun at, lest you end up downing a shot of hot lead."
As much as I want to be called a c*cksucker by Swearengen, I can't get the durned thing to run. The game requires the Virtools plugin to run and Intel Mac owners will need to run a PowerPC-compiled browser under Rosetta; Universal binary browsers don't work. I'll keep tinkering. In the meantime, anyone else sating their Deadwood-desires with Dead Man's Hand?
[Via Wonderland]
Read - I hardly know her! (Fuel Games Blog)
Play - Dead Man's Hand (HBO.com)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
BklynKid @ Jun 13th 2006 3:53PM
That's what you get for using a Mac.
"Ooooh, Macs are so great because they *just* work!" (not quoting you, just the typical Mac user)
BaboonNL @ Jun 13th 2006 4:06PM
little detail: those help screenshots for downloading virtools and stuff show Firefox instead of IE. :D
motainai @ Jun 13th 2006 4:09PM
It's funny because 'deadwood' is a term used in a different card game (gin rummy).
Mal F4cti0n @ Jun 13th 2006 4:32PM
I am on a PC and using IE 6+. After it loaded and I clicked to play, the flash movie screen went black and all I got was music.
I don't think it was your mac, I think that no one bothered to see if the freaking game worked during the beta and they just put it up on the site.
ben @ Jun 13th 2006 5:01PM
I'm no fan of the show or poker or being called a f***er every two minutes. Wow. This really appeals to me! ;)
SickNic @ Jun 13th 2006 5:19PM
I love the show, but this game is just plain mediocre. Cheesy comments thrown in with stuttering lapses in framerates. Yuck!
Tukka @ Jun 13th 2006 5:33PM
Plus it's in violation of show canon. Swearengen doesn't run poker in The Gem because it slows down the action, heh.
Brad Groux @ Jun 13th 2006 6:10PM
Deadwood is an awesome show, and instead of re-watching the episodes at the office I can play a game to waste time =)
Scruffy @ Jun 13th 2006 6:44PM
I got it to work, and it sucks. But it looks mighty pretty for a web game.
Rico @ Jun 13th 2006 8:15PM
I tried to shoot someone mid-game and I got blasted. I then played normally, cleared everyone else out, and got blasted. There's obviously some way to stop this from happening but I'm not likely to bother looking for it.
Daft @ Jun 14th 2006 12:09AM
ehh i cant figure this out, i shot all the bottles and everything.
Ryan @ Jun 15th 2006 4:55PM
Try shooting the lamp behind the bar. Once Al's drunk enough, and the bartender isn't backing him up, he's all yours.