Commit Graph
14 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Claude 27af034095 Add cribbage for two, three or four players
The whole game: the crib, the cut, the play and the show, pegging on a
board drawn with both pegs so the last score is visible as well as the
total.

Three tables rather than one. Two play head to head with six cards and
lay two away; three play singly with five and lay one, with a fourth
card dealt straight into the crib because three hands cannot fill it;
four play in partnerships pegging on one score, where your partner's
crib is your crib. Every table keeps four cards and every crib holds
four, which is what lets one engine serve all three.

The rule that shapes the code is that a game ends on the point that
reaches the target, mid-count if that is where it falls. Every award
goes through one function that stops the game there and refuses
everything after it, so a non-dealer who counts out wins before the
dealer's hand and crib are counted at all — the show reports those as
never counted rather than adding them on.

A go is called by the engine rather than tapped. The count only rises
within a series, so a hand that cannot play now cannot play later in
it, and there is nothing to decide; the log says who went past.

The opponent works out its lay-away rather than guessing: every way of
keeping four is scored against all forty-six cards that could still be
cut, and what goes to the crib is valued separately and added or
subtracted depending on whose crib it is. It takes 114 games out of 120
against random legal play, from either seat.

teamForSeat now takes the seat count, because cribbage is only a
partnership game at four — reading seat % 2 at a table of three would
have put the first and third players on the same side.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DCuRESmSZeJoJond43itw2
2026-08-07 19:07:19 +00:00
Claude 7cd2b412e2 Let each Mastermind player set their own code
A generated code takes away half the game. Whether to repeat a colour,
whether to leave one out, whether to do the thing this opponent will not
expect — those are real decisions, and no random number generator makes
them.

So a game now opens in a SETTING phase: each player chooses the code
their opponent will have to break, one after the other, and the guessing
starts once both are down. They choose in turn rather than at once
because the engine only ever has one seat on the clock, and it costs
nothing — neither can see the other's, so going second is not an
advantage.

The same move carries both: while the codes are being set it is your
code, and after that it is a guess at theirs. Which one it means comes
from the phase rather than from a flag on the move, because the phase is
the thing that actually knows — a flag could disagree with it.

An empty code used to mean one thing and now means two — not chosen yet,
or chosen and hidden from the device this copy was sent to — so the
state carries a flag per player. Whether the other player is ready is
not a secret, and a screen has to be able to say "waiting for them"
rather than sit blank.

The computer sets a code at random and does not try to be clever about
it: a code chosen to beat a particular solver has a pattern in it, and a
pattern is the one thing a code should not have. That single choice is
the only random in the app drawn from a source nobody else can see —
every other one is seeded from the position so a host and a client
agree, but a code seeded from anything on the wire could be worked out
by the player who is meant to be guessing it.

A code set on a guest's device reaches the host as a move and stops
there: moves are intents sent to the host and are never relayed to the
other player, so the only copy that reaches an opponent is redacted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019Pr6B8xDDtJJcb6WJMw7Ud
2026-08-07 14:49:46 +00:00
Claude 284f9f3f95 Add Checkers, Backgammon, Mastermind, and Pirates and Bulgars
The four games that were listed but not written. Nothing in the
catalogue is marked "coming soon" any more.

Checkers is English draughts on the thirty-two dark squares, numbered
the way the game is written down. Captures are compulsory and a multiple
jump is one move object, so a player cannot stop halfway through one —
true by construction rather than by a rule that has to be enforced
somewhere. The move generator matches the published perft counts at one
to four ply (7, 49, 302, 1469), which fold in compulsory capture,
crowning and the men's forward-only rule all at once.

Backgammon's hard rule is not how a checker moves but that a player must
use as much of the roll as they can, and that cannot be checked one move
at a time: a move can be illegal precisely because playing it strands
the other die. So the generator works backwards from whole turns —
memoised depth-first over the remaining dice — and offers only the first
steps of the longest plays. Recomputing it after each checker is what
makes the rule true by construction. Every die comes from the table's
seed and a count of rolls made, which is in the state rather than beside
it so a game is reproducible from what crosses the wire. There is no
doubling cube; the rules document says so plainly.

Mastermind is played as a duel — both players are set a code and both
are breaking one — because the pencil-and-paper game gives the codemaker
nothing to do. It ends at the foot of a round, never mid-round, or going
first would be worth half a guess. It is the one game here with anything
to hide, so viewFor does real work: the host sends each device only its
own code, and a device that was never given a code refuses to score a
guess against it rather than quietly answering "nothing".

Pirates and Bulgars is Sackson's theming of Asalto, and the rules
document is explicit about which parts are attested and which had to be
chosen — the book could not be obtained. Two hunters who take by
jumping against twenty-four who cannot take at all, on a thirty-three
point cross whose drawn lines come from the same adjacency table the
moves come from, so the board and the rules cannot disagree.

130 unit tests across the four engines, all run locally as well as in
CI: game/ has no Android in it, which is what makes that possible.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019Pr6B8xDDtJJcb6WJMw7Ud
2026-08-07 07:58:12 +00:00
Claude 94b51347c3 Add Nine Men's Morris
Nine pieces each on twenty-four points: place them, then move them, and
every line of three takes an enemy piece off the board. Two pieces left,
or no legal move, and the game is over. See docs/RULES-morris.md.

The board is numbered ring * 8 + index, so its geometry falls out
arithmetically rather than being typed in as a table of twenty-four
rows: neighbours around a square are the index either side, the ladders
between squares run through the odd indices alone, and a mill is three
consecutive points centred on an odd one. A table would say the same
thing and could be wrong in one row.

A turn is one move object — the piece placed or stepped, and the enemy
piece taken when that closes a mill. Generating the removal as part of
the move rather than as a turn of its own means there is no moment where
a player is halfway through a turn, so a device that drops off the
network between closing a mill and choosing what to take cannot leave
the table stuck, and the search counts one ply for what is one decision.

Three rules about mills are easy to get backwards and all three are
tested: the piece that arrives is what closes a mill, so stepping out
takes nothing and stepping back in pays again; a slide along the line
being completed is not a mill, because the third piece it needs is the
one that just moved; and a piece in a mill is spared unless every enemy
piece is in one, without which a player could never be reduced and the
game would not end.

The AI is negamax with alpha-beta and iterative deepening over the same
rules engine, with a node budget so the placing phase does not stall a
phone. It has no quiescence tail and does not need one: there are no
exchanges in Morris. Its evaluation knows that being down to three is
dangerous even with flying on — without that term the search reads three
pieces going anywhere as freedom and starts steering towards losing
pieces to get there, which is a real game it would throw away.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019Pr6B8xDDtJJcb6WJMw7Ud
2026-08-07 05:52:26 +00:00
Claude cdd515afc6 Add Ta Yü
Rivers laid out from the centre of an 18x18 board on 1x3 tiles, each with
three mouths that must line up with whatever they touch. One side runs water
north and south, the other east and west, and a side's score is one edge
multiplied by the other — so reaching only one of your two edges is worth
nothing, which is the whole tension of the game.

Two things fell out of the geometry rather than needing to be tabulated. The
tile set is generated: three mouths chosen from the eight places one can sit
on a 1x3 tile gives 56 arrangements, turning a tile end for end pairs them
off with none fixed, so there are exactly 28 distinct tiles and the box's 84
is three of each. And because every tile joins the network by a mouth while
all three of its own mouths interconnect, the board is always one connected
river system — so scoring never traces connectivity, and a mouth at the edge
is an exit by construction. Both properties are asserted over whole games.

The placement check is one comparison doing two jobs: where a new tile abuts
an old one, both sides must agree. That refuses a river dead-ending against
stone and, read the other way, refuses a blank flank that would wall off a
river already down.

18x18 comes out under 20dp a cell on a phone, too fine to tap, so laying a
tile is a tap to line it up and a button to commit. Tapping the same cell
again cycles the other legal ways the tile could cover it, which is also how
it gets turned — a rotate control would have landed on illegal positions. A
tap on a cell the tile cannot cover is ignored rather than treated as a
deselection, so a fingertip one cell wide of the mark does not throw away a
placement.

Two AI settings, not three. A blocking-heavy variant was written and dropped
because it played the full setting dead even over 30 games; shipping it as a
step up would have been a claim that could not be backed. What ships is held
to measured numbers: full strength won 20 of 20 against random placement from
either axis, gentle beats random about three games in four and loses to full
strength about four in five, and random against random comes out even, which
is what makes the rest of those numbers mean anything.

The reconstruction's uncertainties stay called out in the rules doc rather
than being smoothed over now that the code exists: the 18x18 board reading,
the marked exits placed at 3, 8 and 13 by choice, and the three-player flood
variant left out because nothing found says how the flood scores.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015pyhC1KyFkQk6hUnnX2Tof
2026-08-06 18:09:10 +00:00
Claude 9f71e0844b Specify Ta Yü ahead of building it, and list it as coming
Ta Yü has been out of print since the 2009 Goliath reissue, so the rulebook
had to be reconstructed from secondary sources — and this machine's network
policy blocks everything but search summaries, so BGG's rules files were out
of reach too.

The tile set fell out of the geometry rather than needing a component list.
A 1x3 tile has eight places a river mouth can sit; three mouths chosen from
eight gives 56 arrangements, and turning a tile end for end pairs them off
with no arrangement fixed, leaving exactly 28 distinct tiles. The reissue
has 84 tiles and the 1999 original had 112 — 3x28 and 4x28. Twelve of the 28
touch three flanks of the rectangle, which is what the ringed centre stud on
the reissued tiles marks. Three independent numbers agreeing is why the
geometry is worth trusting.

What could not be pinned down is called out in the doc rather than smoothed
over: the board is taken as 18x18 because that is the reading under which
"the four centre indentations" is true, the marked exits are placed at 3, 8
and 13 by choice, and the three-player flood variant is left out entirely
because nothing found says how the flood scores, and inventing that would be
shipping a different game. Same posture as the Sequence board layout.

The catalogue entry is added with available = false, so it shows as coming
soon on dev builds and stays out of production until the engine lands.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015pyhC1KyFkQk6hUnnX2Tof
2026-08-06 17:18:47 +00:00
Claude d6e237ce4a Add chess
The full game: castling with every condition, en passant including the
case where taking would expose your own king, promotion to any of the
four, pins, checkmate, stalemate, insufficient material, the fifty-move
rule and threefold repetition.

Move generation is checked against the published perft counts rather
than against hand-written cases — the opening array to depth four
(197,281 positions) plus four standard test positions chosen precisely
because they break generators. Those counts are exact, so matching them
leaves very little room for a rule to be subtly wrong.

The opponent is a negamax search with alpha-beta, iterative deepening
and a capture-only quiescence tail, at three strengths. The quiescence
tail is the part that stops it hanging pieces: a fixed-depth search that
stops mid-exchange scores the position as though the recapture never
comes.

Two supporting changes:

The AI now thinks off the caller's thread. A card AI answers instantly,
but a chess search runs for a second or more, and the match controller's
scope belongs to the screen — searching there would freeze the board it
is drawn on.

Offline setup can seat the local player somewhere other than seat 0,
which is what lets you play Black. Seat 0 is White by definition, so
choosing a colour has to choose a seat.

FEN is read and written, so a table can start from a set position.

203 engine tests pass locally.
2026-08-06 13:34:31 +00:00
Claude fb70396d09 Add Kaiser, Crazy 8s and Wizard
Three more card games, engine to screen.

Kaiser: 32-card prairie trick-taking with bidding, the five of hearts
worth five and the three of spades costing three. Bidding is capped at
ten because ten is all a hand can be worth, and a losing score gives the
game a floor — without one a table that keeps bidding and going down
never reaches a result.

Crazy 8s: eights are wild and name the suit in force, which is why the
table states that suit in words rather than leaving it to be read off
the pile. Blocked rounds are scored rather than hanging.

Wizard: the 60-card deck, one more card dealt each round until the pack
runs out, bid your tricks exactly. The shared card model gains WIZARD
and JESTER ranks, so every ordinary deck now builds from Rank.standard
rather than walking the whole enum.

Also fixes a lobby bug this would have hit: hosting seated the
catalogue minimum rather than the table the host had just set up, so a
six-handed game would have been rejected by its own rules engine.

164 engine tests pass locally.
2026-08-06 10:21:23 +00:00
Claude d30ea8656f Fix section ordering in the Golf rules
The opening-cards section had been dropped into the middle of the table
setup list, stranding the discard pile and deck-count bullets after it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
2026-08-06 04:00:16 +00:00
Claude d989907d7e Golf: 8-card grids, chosen openers, final putt, end-of-hole score card
- An 8-card variant, laid out as two rows of four. The existing column
  scoring covers it without change.

- Opening cards are now chosen rather than dealt face up. Nothing starts
  revealed; each player in turn turns over their allowance, and the hole
  begins once everyone has picked. This needed a new SETUP phase in the
  engine, since it is a real decision and has to be validated like any
  other move rather than being decided at deal time.

- "Line up the final putt", off by default: throw a drawn card away
  without turning your last face-down card over, so you are not forced to
  close the hole on a card you did not choose. Only offered on the last
  face-down card. Because a whole table could otherwise decline forever,
  two full laps of nothing but thrown cards calls the hole and scores it
  where it stands.

- The end of a hole now shows a score card — every player's strokes for
  the hole and their running total, lowest first — and the next hole is
  not dealt until it is dismissed. MatchController gained a general
  awaitsConfirmation hook for this, so any game wanting a scoreboard
  between rounds can stop the table the same way. Only the host waits;
  clients render what they are sent.

Nine more Golf tests, covering the 8-card layout, the opening choice,
when the putt option is and is not offered, and that a table refusing to
putt out still finishes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
2026-08-06 03:59:53 +00:00
Claude 532c3ea48a Add President and Golf
Two more games on the existing framework — no changes were needed to the
lobby, networking, settings or update layers, which is what the shared
GameRules/GameAi contract was for.

President
- Threes low, twos high. Lead any number of one rank; follow with the
  same count of a higher rank, or pass. When everyone has passed the
  pile comes down and the last player to play leads again.
- Toggles: player count, rounds, twos clear the pile, four of a kind
  bombs, and the between-round card exchange.
- Plays are offered as whole sets rather than by selecting cards. A set
  is the unit of the game, so choosing from the legal sets is both
  easier to operate and impossible to get wrong.

Golf
- 4, 6 or 9 card grids. Draw from stock or discard, then either swap the
  card in or — only if it came off the stock — throw it and turn one of
  your own over. A card taken from the discard pile has to be used.
- Matching columns cancel to nothing; on the 3x3 board rows do too, but
  not on the shallower grids where three cards are not a line.
- Face-down cards are hidden from everyone including their owner, which
  is the point of the game: viewFor masks them with a fixed placeholder
  so the real card never reaches the device that has not turned it over.

Both engines are pure Kotlin and unit tested — 71 tests now, covering
ranking, legal moves, pile and hole resolution, scoring, redaction, wire
round-trips, and full random and AI playthroughs. The Golf test also
checks the AI actually beats random play rather than merely being legal.

Also widened the setup screen's option chips to wrap: the reveal-count
row carries up to ten, and a chip off the edge of the screen is a
setting that cannot be changed — the same failure as the Euchre Pass
button.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
2026-08-06 03:25:09 +00:00
Claude dbe76c34c4 Brand the app with the Wallace tartan and a Celtic splash
- The launcher icon is a single square of the tartan, drawn as a vector
  so it stays sharp at any density and ships no PNGs. The adaptive
  icon's foreground is deliberately empty: the cloth is the icon.
- Tartan.kt draws the sett as warp, then as weft at half opacity. That
  overlap is what gives the blended squares and reads as woven cloth
  rather than a printed grid, and it is reused by both the icon and the
  splash.
- The app opens on the tartan under "Pro Libertate Games" in Uncial
  Antiqua, holds two seconds, then fades. It is an overlay rather than a
  destination, so the menu is already composed behind it and the fade
  reveals a live screen. The window background is set to a dark red so
  launch does not flash white before Compose draws.

Two things to be aware of:

- WallaceSett is an approximation. It reads as Wallace — bold red and
  black check with a narrow gold overstripe — but the registered
  threadcount could not be verified here, so the counts were chosen to
  look right. They are plain data and can be swapped for the registered
  ones without touching anything else.
- Uncial Antiqua is bundled under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, with
  the full licence at docs/licenses/UncialAntiqua-OFL.txt. The OFL
  requires that to be distributed with the font, so it must not be
  separated from it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
2026-08-06 02:52:55 +00:00
Claude 60ddcdf67f Caption Sequence jacks as WILD or REMOVE
A jack's power is carried by its artwork on a real deck — drawn in
profile it shows one eye and removes a chip, drawn face-on it shows two
and is wild. These cards render as rank and suit only, so J♦ and J♠ were
indistinguishable in hand despite doing opposite things.

Jacks in hand now carry the word on their face, and the hint under the
hand says what tapping will do rather than the generic "tap a highlighted
square", which was wrong for a one-eyed jack anyway — those target an
opponent's chip, not a highlighted empty square.

The caption is a general PlayingCardView option, so any later game whose
cards carry meaning beyond rank and suit can use it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
2026-08-06 02:39:51 +00:00
Claude 487c68419e Add app shell with Euchre and Sequence, LAN/Bluetooth play
First vertical slice: the whole shell plus two games playable end to end,
so every layer is exercised before the other nine games are built on it.

Games
- Euchre: bowers, ordering up, dealer discard, going alone, stick the
  dealer, and full scoring. Rule variants (deck size, points to win,
  stick the dealer, going alone) are toggles in game setup.
- Sequence: two-eyed and one-eyed jacks, free corners, locked sequences,
  the shared-chip limit, and dead-card exchange. Teams, players per team
  and the sequence target are toggles.
- The board layout in SequenceBoard is generated, not the commercial
  board — it holds every structural property the rules need, but does not
  match a physical board. Documented in docs/RULES-sequence.md.

Multiplayer
- One transport abstraction over newline-delimited JSON, implemented
  twice: LAN via NSD discovery and TCP, Bluetooth via Classic RFCOMM.
  A lobby advertises on both at once, so a table can mix them.
- Host-authoritative: clients send move intents, the host re-validates
  every one against the rules, and each client receives a state redacted
  for its own seat so hidden information never crosses the wire.
- Seats start as AI and are handed to people as they join, which is what
  makes any mix of humans and AI work without a separate code path.

Shell
- Main menu lists all eleven games; the nine without engines are marked
  coming soon and are driven entirely by GameCatalog.
- Settings: sound, animation speed (one multiplier drives card movement
  and AI thinking time), and OTA updates from the latest GitHub release.
- Layouts measure available space rather than assuming an orientation.

The game package is free of Android types, so the rules engines and AI
run under plain JUnit; 43 tests cover ranking, following suit, scoring,
sequence detection, redaction, wire round-trips and full random and AI
playthroughs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
2026-08-05 22:37:05 +00:00