BoardgameEngine

A gem that provides a template for creating boardgames. It aims to streamline the process of making boardgames to be played on the terminal by providing a variety of classes and modules.

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

$ bundle add boardgame_engine

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

$ gem install boardgame_engine

To start making your own boardgame using this gem, your game module needs at least two classes - a Game class inheriting from Boardgame and a Board class inheriting Board. Game captures the core gameplay loop/logic and the Board captures interactions with the board.

Depending on the game rules, select child modules from the Games and Boards and include it into the Game and Board class respectively. These modules will handle much of the game and board logic related to the game mechanic/rule.

For example, if the turns in your game go in a cycle like 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 1 -> 2 ... your Game class would look like

class Game < BoardgameEngine::Game
  include Games::CyclicalGame
  NUM_PLAYERS = 3
  ...
end

Including this module makes it so that the BoardgameEngine::Game#change_turn method automatically hands the turn over to the correct player.

At the current stage of the app, there are methods that necessarily must be overridden in the child class. play_turn must be implemented on your Game class, and must contain what happens during a single turn (not a round, just a turn).

Additionally, the limited number of modules mean that you will probably have to implement some methods on your own. I hope to reduce the number of these as the app matures. I left yard comments on all module methods, so hopefully overriding won't be too difficult.

Check out connect4.rb for a game built with rather minimal overrides and chess.rb for a game that makes heavy use of customization.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/Forthoney/boardgame_engine. I may not get to them quickly but it will be greatly helpful

As the app is under heavy development I will not look deeply into actually pulling pull requests (if there were to be any). I will definitely consider the ideas proposed in them, so they are still welcome.