5 Card Flickr 1.5 is released! It has been heavily recoded, simplified, and now uses flickr API to fetch photos- see it in action at http://5card.cogdogblog.com/

It is modeled, or even conceptually copied, from Five Card Nancy game (http://www.scottmccloud.com/inventions/nancy/nancy.html) devised by comics guru Scott McCloud and the nifty web version at 741.5 Comics (http://www.7415comics.com/nancy).

In the Nancy game players are dealt cards made from separate panels from the Ernie Bushmiller cartoon strip, and must try and create a coherent story from randomly drawn panels. It is a fabulous exercise in visual storytelling.

I wrote this web site to provide the same functionality, but with images drawn from a particular set of images in the photo sharing site flickr.com given a particular tag.

So, in 5 Card Flickr, in 5 rounds you are dealt 5 random photo from public shared photos in flickr, and the player picks the best one to create a story. At the end of the round, they can save their story and annotate with comments that are saved on the Gallery portion of the web site.

In this implementation, you can set up multiple versions, e.g. a different flickr tag for a set of photos and stories (e.g. a part that does stories on all glickr photos tagged "dogs" and another one for all flickr stories tagged "cats")

The site works by using the flickr API to poll for new photos with a given tag, and storying basic data for that photo locally so we can construct a a link to the thumbnail on flickr and a link to the original.

Also, version 1.5 features a "Tweet" button so users can send a twitter announcement for their own story, or one they have read on the site, a cut and paste HTML version of a story, and a new admin interface.