Mostly it was just practice so I had a good grasp of foo#bar and length(foo) for my guide. If you check the code, it actually legitimately shuffles a deck, with each card represented by a letter. A-M I think is Spades, N-Z is Clubs, a-m is hearts, and n-z is diamonds (or something like that). The game then deals the cards into hands which is then where they’re actually read from. It could work very much as a backbone for card games in general, although AI for anything more complex than blackjack would be pretty code intensive (and well outside CS’s design scope).
I was actually thinking Tarot, though I’m not sure about the best way of tracking up/down orientation.