My friends and I at uni love playing Shithead into the wee hours. But soon we graduate and will leave town, so probably won't get together for a game for a while.

I want to develop a Java app we can use to play Shithead and our other favorites over a network.

An app like this already exists, but is ugly, buggy and does not support our house rules. The source is available, but is such a mess that I would really rather start from scratch than try to refactor it!

Building my game using some standard playing card api or framework, if such a thing exists, would be better than starting from scratch. The answer to a similar SO question was to use the JPC-API, which allegedly provides basic playing card services and rendering. But this Sourceforge project currently makes available no files or source code!

Is there an alternative, or somewhere else to find this framework?

Soon I will need help with the following as well:

• Lobby services (finding other players)
• Gaming network protocol (to communicate moves between players)
• Gaming theory (to write the computer opponent)
• Winning condition detection
• Game UI development