Going to Games, Inviting Friends and Counting Watchers

Our latest additions to Jawaker include a bunch of heavily requested features that help players find each other and play with their friends online. For all Basha users that can see their friends online, players can click the red arrow next to their friend's name and choose to either go to the game they are playing in (if they are in one) or invite them to the current game they are in (if they are part of an ongoing game). If they are part of a private game, Jawaker will also send the password of that game as a notification so that players can easily play private games with friends. One other small addition is that we added the number of players that are watching your game so that you can know how popular your playing style is with other interested players :)

Jawaker Releases the "Jawaker Store"

Jawaker is proud to announce its latest move into the world of virtual goods with the launch of the "Jawaker Store"! Players can now buy from a host of locally relevant virtual goods that include hookahs, falafel sandwiches and local clothing. Some goods are available on the table for the duration of the game only, and others are available across games over the period of a few days. Of course, all goods can be bought for any player or as gifts for other players using the virtual currency of tokens on Jawaker :)

Paying by SMS in Egypt

Our players can now pay by SMS from any phone in Egypt! Jawaker has secured payment via all Egyptian networks (Etisalat, Mobinil and Vodafone). This is part of our continuing effort to expand the payment options available to our players. Stay tuned for many more payment options to come!

Jawaker and the World Cup!

We know that our players love football... and we know that EVERYBODY loves the World Cup! Jawaker was very excited about creating something special for the World Cup and we are proud to release our idea today. Each day, Jawaker will post the games that will be played that day and give players a chance to become a fan of one of the teams. A player can become a fan of his favorite team by exchanging tokens and choosing how many "goals" he would like to score for his team every time he wins a game on Jawaker! The more goals the player wants to score, the more tokens they must exchange. When the player becomes a fan, then every game he wins will score goals for his team as long as he scores them before the time runs out. When the time runs out, the game is over and we will announce the winning team on Jawaker before the real game takes place! The top scorer of the winning team will also win a prize!

Player Profiles on Jawaker

We made a small but significant change on Jawaker. We added a feature that allows players to hover over their names (or the names of other players on the table) and see certain information. All players can now see the name, tokens, age, country, number of friends and membership date of everyone. The profile layer has thus been eliminated! Basha players will be able to see additional information regarding each player's game statistics, such as their wins, losses and the number of games that they left from. This information is shown for each player over the last 30 days as well as over their entire period of membership. Jawaker also made it easier for a player to see their own statistics and information by hovering over their name in the top right corner. We plan to enhance this profile with more information and statistics in the future, so stay tuned!

Simplifying Ranking

We have just deployed a change to our ranking system on Jawaker. This change is aimed at simplifying our ranking system so that it is clearer to all players how ranking works and how they can improve their rank. We will no longer be relying on a "black-box" model for ranking and we hope that all future developments on ranking will be done in a transparent fashion that is clear to all players right on the game summary. The simplest form of ranking (Games Won / Games Completed + Games Left) will result in your percentage grade. Only games within the last 30 days will be taken into consideration and players must have played at least 15 games during that period to be eligible to get ranked.

We just launched the first Baloot game for Facebook! Our Baloot Facebook application is up and running and we encourage you all to check it out.

Paying for Jawaker Basha in the UAE

Our players can now subscribe and pay for Jawaker Basha from the UAE! Jawaker has secured payment via both UAE networks (Etisalat and Du). This is part of our continuing effort to expand the payment options available to our players. Stay tuned for many more payment options to come!

Payment by Jawwal in Palestine is Now Available

We are happy to announce that our players can now subscribe and pay for Jawaker Basha using their Jawwal mobile phone in Palestine. This is part of our continuing effort to expand the payment options available to our players. Stay tuned for many more payment options to come!

Play Jawaker on Facebook

Today we launched our second Facebook application for Jawaker. The first one was our Tarneeb application and this next one is our full Trix application. Our latest application is actually 4-games-in-1 and includes Trix, Trix Complex, Trix Partner and Trix Complex Partner. Users can play right from inside their Facebook accounts and will eventually be able to link their Jawaker accounts and compete with friends.

No More Bad Language on Jawaker

Bad language has always been completely unacceptable on Jawaker. The vast majority of our users were suffering from the actions of a few that were hurting the entire gaming experience on the site. However, chatting is an important and fun tool that brings an extra dimension to the game, so the Jawaker team had to do something.
We initially had a system whereby users complain about this misuse and the Jawaker team would follow up and ban people accordingly. With Jawaker growing at an unprecedented pace, this banning system was quickly becoming impossible to control. So Jawaker compiled an intelligent list of bad words in Arabic, English and "Arabeezy" that the system automatically catches and bans the user from using the chat on the spot and stops the display of the entire sentence containing the bad word. This list will constantly be updated and refined, but we feel that it is a critical part of maintaining Jawaker's reputation as a clean, fun and family-friendly website that has zero tolerance for any inappropriate behaiviour that the majority of our users do not accept.

Virtual Goods on Jawaker

Jawaker has introduced its first virtual good that players can buy right on the game table. Our virtual "argeeleh" (or hookah) can be bought during any game in exchange for tokens! Players can buy the argeeleh for themselves or gift it to someone else in the game. The argeeleh will appear right in front of the player who owns it with an added animation and sound effect when you hover over it. This is Jawaker's first move towards a virtual economy of goods that is locally relevant and we will hopefully introduce more and more virtual goods in the future for the entertainment of our players. Enjoy!

Watch the Final Game of the King of Trix Complex Partner on YouTube

Winners of the "King of Trix Complex Partner" Competition

Congratulations to the winners of the first "King of Trix Complex Partner" competition on Jawaker! CHEmomen and عمروشاح were the champs of the competition. Jawaker recorded the game and published it on YouTube with all cards open for everyone to see! More on that later :) As a prize, they both won 3 months of Basha for FREE!

Inviting Your Friends to Play

We have implemented a long awaited feature on Jawaker, which is the ability to invite your friends to play via email. This feature is common on many social networking sites, and allows users to import their contacts from their Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo! email accounts and send them all invitations to join them on Jawaker. We are very pleased to offer this feature to our players and we hope that it will enhance the viral growth of Jawaker.

The "King of Trix Complex Partner" Competition is Launched!

After a very successful Tarneeb competition, the Jawaker team took the feedback from players and improved many things about how the competitions are run and structured. Since our competitions are designed on the back-end to be scalable in their creation and in running them, we are able to start new competitions fairly quickly in any game. We decided to launch the "King of Trix Complex Partner" as our next competition with 64 instead of 32 players. We are very happy to announce that the competition filled up in a matter of hours! The winner of this competition will get a 3-month Basha subscription from Jawaker.

Payment by Mobily in Saudi Arabia is Now Available

We are pleased to announce that our players can now subscribe and pay for Jawaker Basha using their Mobily mobile phone in Saudi Arabia. We have now secured payment by SMS from any mobile phone network in Saudi Arabia, something that we already have in Jordan. We hope to have the entire Arab world covered in the near future!

Winners of the "King of Tarneeb" Competition

Congratulations to the winners of the first "King of Tarneeb" competition on Jawaker! Blackcat88 and shagyman joined together during the last game to beat abujenin and ibrahim77 in a great final. As a prize, they both had their names on the game tables of the entire site for 3 days!

Payment by STC is Saudi Arabia is Now Available

We are happy to announce that our players can now subscribe and pay for Jawaker Basha using their STC mobile phone in Saudi Arabia. This is part of our continuing effort to expand the payment options available to our players. Stay tuned for many more payment options to come!

The "King of Tarneeb" Competition is Launched!

We just launched our first Tarneeb competition to crown the Jawaker "King of Tarneeb". This competition is the first of its kind, because it was set-up completely automatically using a customized competition generation system that we built. We only had 32 seats available and the competition was open to Basha players only. We were very happy that it got filled up in a matter of hours! We will be testing a few things this time around and tweaking some stuff so that we can have more competitions for more games very soon. Good luck to the winner who will get 3 full days of promotion on Jawaker's cards and tables!

One Card Payment is Available and Credit Card Payment System is Revamped

Jawaker is proud to announce that players can now pay using the popular One Card payment system. One Card is a prepaid voucher that is very popular in many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. Players can pay for Jawaker Basha subscriptions by buying One Card token codes.
Jawaker also revamped its credit card payment system to use the popular 2Checkout service offering. 2Checkout is a very streamlined, straightforward and secure payment system and enhances the ability for players to pay for the Jawaker Basha service.

SMS Payments in Saudi Arabia and Basra for ALL

Jawaker is proud to announce that our users from Saudi Arabia can now pay for Jawaker Basha by SMS from any Zain phone line. This is the first step in our continuos effort to make sure that all our players outside Jordan have access to the most flexible methods of payment in their country.

In another development, Jawaker also released Basra as its newest game on the site! Basra was previously only accessible to Jawaker Basha subscribers, but can now be played by all. We hope that you enjoy our first 2-player card game :)

New Score Box

We made a subtle yet important change to the game table. We moved things around to make room for the score box with the overall scores to show on the table at all times. This is important for players who want to see the score right away without the need for another click to pull up the entire score sheet. Players can still see the detailed score sheet by clicking on the "Show Scores" link.
To make room for the score box, we moved around some links. The expanding and collapsing of cards is now indicated by a white arrow next to the player's cards, the sound off and sound on image is on the top right below the game name, the turn on and off chat functionality is on the chat panels and the last hand link is below the game information on the top left of the table.

The Basha Has Arrived!

After months of planning, research and a lot of hard work, the Jawaker team is proud to announce the launch of its newest product: Jawaker Basha. Jawaker Basha is the premium paid service of Jawaker. We bundled a bunch of extra features into one service offering that will be offered to players at a reasonable monthly subscription fee. In addition, we will be developing all future features under this service offering, so players with a Jawaker Basha account will take advantage of the current and future set of features. That being said, the core Jawaker product, which players have been enjoying for all this time, will not change and will remain free forever. We will not and do not plan to take away anything from Jawaker players, and will only have additional features in the Jawaker Basha service offering.
Our rationale for launching Jawaker Basha was based on a number of things. First of all, we are experimenting with a bunch of ways to monetize the traffic on the site. Even though we believe in our online advertising model, we feel that Jawaker would be more solid with a hedged revenue stream like monthly subscriptions. This would strengthen the company's finances and fund future developments on the site. We also believe that a free basic service offering and a paid premium service offering has the benefit of only charging players who are willing to pay for these additional features, without risking the backlash of charging players who want the basic feature set for free. For more information on what Jawaker Basha offers click here.

Private Chat

After months of hard work, the multi-talented technical team at Jawaker launched one of the site's greatest achievements: Private Chat. This feature is simple and powerful, and it facilitates one-on-one private chat between friends on Jawaker; across different games and the game index list. The functionality was built from scratch and also includes notifications of when your friends come online and go offline. The intention of this feature is to make it easier for friends to organize games and play together on Jawaker. This feature will be part of the premium paid bundle to be offered by Jawaker in the very near future.

Mutual Friendship

Jawaker is a more than just a card gaming website, it's a community. We made an important step towards this vision by introducing the concept of mutual friendship. Whereas previously players could "Star" and "Flag" each other, these actions were one-sided "bookmarks", so to speak. Today we launched a new approach that models a standard social network. Players can add friends directly from the game table or manage their relationships from the "Friends" page on the profile. this management includes accepting and refusing invitations as well as blocking players. Players can also search for their friends by username from this page, in case they missed them on the game table.
Another small change is that we took out the complaint system from the friendship model. This means that complaints now go directly to the Jawaker Team and we use the data to manage our site policies.

Game Creation and Filtering

We just launched our latest set of features to be tested: Game Creation and Filtering. This set of features will allow users to create a private (password protected) game that doesn't show on the game index. Once the creator shares the game link with other players, they are prompted to enter the password in order to join the game, otherwise they will not be allowed to join.
We also added the ability for players to create games by minimum rank. This feature defines the minimum rank a player must have in order to join a particular game, thus ensuring that similarly skilled players can play together.
As an added cherry on top for this feature, we also included the ability for players to filter games on the game index by minimum rank, games with friends and timer.