I am creating a 4 player card game (2 teams of 2) that uses a standard deck of 52 cards.

Each round, one of the players leads a card, then it is the player to the lefts turn to play the next card. Once all 4 players have played a card that round is complete and a new round starts. The game is complete when all players run out of cards.

I am trying to determine what features of GameSparks would make the most sense. This is my first game and first time using GameSparks, although I have been programming for a number of years.

To start a match, the player has the option of:

1. Joining a game with 3 other random players.
2. Creating a private match to play friends
3. Joining a private match a friend created

When first planning the game I originally only planned on having private matches but GameSparks looks like it may make it easy to create public matches.

Before hearing about GameSparks I planned on using Firebase. Private matches would of been joined using a match code that would of been shared between players. This code would of been used to locate the path in Firebase to load the match data. There is very little match data that needs to be stored.

1. Game options (this will also contain current score)
   
2. Each players cards
3. Currently played cards
4. Cards won by each team

So I have 2 main issues:

1. What is the best way to start public/private matches
2. What is the best way to store/share current game state