Don't worry. You can always come back to a project when you have enough experience to do it successfully. It's better to find out at the beginning than halfway through when you're ready to tear your hair out.

Seconded.

Ya, I agree. Though there are people like nitacku who seem quite good at constructing AI and could possibly help if ya asked.

Another thing: There's always multiplayer, which requires no AI coding or almost none. However, linked gameplay may be harder so as first project, you may want to just make a version of the game where each player enters a password at the start of the game, then when it's a player turn, he takes the calc, enters the password, finishes his turn, then the next player does the same, and back and forth until the game ends. The passwords are to make sure the other player won't click enter when it's the other player turn and it says "Press ENTER when ready.", thus, he can't look at his deck.

I guess it could do that, but then what if you use and ability to see the AI's hand?

Otherwise, if you don't use that ability at all, it works quite excellently.

he could if he wanted to add a nice spin to the game

Though, that's a lot more coding

Also note that a YuGiOh AI could be made a bit easier by allowing it to cheat a bit.  Since you can't see its hand, it could be allowed to find cards in its own deck to put into its hand in order to make it reasonably difficult.  This is generally frowned upon but if done correctly could make for great AI and an AI that would be a lot easier to customize for difficulty.

Yeah Starcraft does that. In the first game, the computer knew where your base was, so he did not need to scout the map and hiding or stuff like that was hard.

One thing, though: if you ever get AI working, please do not make the game as hard as the Playstation 1 version or two of the Gameboy Advance games (one was kinda RPG-ish, where you could walk on maps and talk to NPCs, but it was not Sacred Cards). Those were so hard that they got bad reviews for the most part just because of that.

You're welcome?