James Stanley

Stockfighter Review (no spoilers)

Fri 22 April 2016

I've been playing Stockfighter this week.

The reason I didn't start playing it sooner was my impression that the deal was "do lots of work, and maybe we'll help you find a new job". But I don't want a new job, so I wasn't interested.

After I read more about it, I decided to give it a try, and it blew me away. The single most addictive game I've ever played. It has ruined my sleep pattern for the last 3 nights. I would say I wish the game was longer, but really I'm glad it's over so I don't have to think about it any more. Highly addictive.

I perhaps had a bit of an advantage over the average player (having written automated bitcoin trading bots for my Bitgroin hedge fund), but the game presents all of the concepts in a way that should make them easy to pick up.

I used Perl to do all of the programming, with the excellent Mojolicious providing the HTTP and websocket client support for the later levels. None of my solutions required a large amount of code, just a lot of thinking.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I recommend everybody go and play it.