I'm in the planning phases for a card game, where multiple people (not many, maybe up to 6) would be able to play, each one taking a turn.
Ideally, all people would play the game in the same place, at the same time. Multipeer Connectivity Framework sounded ideal, but after reading in some posts that it's unreliable, and slow, I'm wondering if Multi-Peer Matches would be best or even an option.
Other than the obvious (one uses Bluetooth and Wifi, and the other Game Center), what are the difference between the two?
My experience is that multipeer connectivity works well with up to 7 connections. However, connections do drop sporadically and you need to handle detecting that and automatically re-connecting. Also, you cannot maintain connections in the background so if one of the players jumps into another app and then comes back, their connection will have been dropped.
Alternatively, you could use Google Play Game Services. It works on both iOS and Android and removes a lot of complexity from the developer.
It is able to use peer-to-peer connections where appropriate:
"Internally, the room sets up a peer-to-peer mesh network between participants where clients can communicate directly with each other, rather than through the Play Game services servers"