Simple Card Game in Python

Question

After finishing up finals, I wasn't really working on coding for a while. I decided to write a card game to get back into the programming scene. I'm just wondering if there's anything that I missed or could be improved upon.

import random

suit_choices = ("Diamonds", "Hearts", "Clubs", "Spades")
suit_picked = random.choice(suit_choices)

number_picked = random.randint(2,9)

while True:
    print suit_choices
    user_card = raw_input('\nEnter a suit to pick from. Your choices are listed above. ').title()

    if user_card == suit_picked:
        print '\nYou guessed the suit type correct!'
        user_number = input('\nNow pick a number card (2-9) ')
        if user_number == number_picked:
            print '\n You guessed the card number correct!'
            break
        else:
            print '\nShucks. Try again.'
            continue
    else:
        print '\nOH NO'
        continue

Answer 1

There are a couple of things I'd say you're currently missing:

1. A way to quit;
2. Input validation; and
3. Scoring.

---

At the moment, your while True will run forever. It is not unreasonable to think that a user might eventually get bored! Therefore you could add something like:

if raw_input("Play again (y/n)? ").lower() == "n":
    break

To the end of the main loop.

---

Your game will fall over if the user enters something for the "card number" that can't be evaluated. Also, they can enter something that isn't a suit. As @otus points out, you shouldn't use input; I would suggest you add more validation. This SO community wiki will be useful to you, you should end up with something like

user_card = get_str_input('\nEnter a suit to pick from. Your choices are listed above. ',
                          suit_choices)
...
user_number = get_int_input('\nNow pick a number card (2-9) ', 2, 9)

Where those functions only ever return valid input and catch any associated errors.

---

You're making a game; why not tell the player how they're doing? The simplest way would be something like:

right = wrong = 0

then += 1 to the appropriate value each time through the loop. After they quit, show something like:

print "You got {0} right and {0} wrong".format(right, wrong)
if right > wrong + 2:
    print "Well done!"
elif right > wrong - 2:
    print "Not bad"
else:
    print "Bad luck"

---

Also, card games lend themselves very well to OOP; you could have Card, Deck and Game classes, for example:

class Game(object):

    def __init__(self, suits=None, faces=None):
        if suits is None:
            suits = ("Diamonds", "Hearts", "Clubs", "Spades")
        if faces is None:
            faces = range(2, 10)
        self.suits, self.faces = suits, faces
        self.deck = Deck(self.suits, self.faces)
        self.deck.shuffle()
        self.score = {'right': 0, 'wrong': 0}

    def main_menu():
        ...

    def _input_suit(self):
        ...

    def _input_face(self):
        ...

    ...

Answer 2

        continue

Both your continue statements fall back to the end of the loop anyway, so they are redundant.

---

    user_number = input('\nNow pick a number card (2-9) ')

In the other place you correctly used raw_input. The difference is that input executes the given string as an expression, which is seldom what you want (and usually unsafe).

---

Nothing else really. The \ns at the start of all your strings are a bit ugly, and some people prefer using empty print statements to indicate extra empty lines.