Deckard

This project aspires to be a card game engine with:

• An interactive terminal UI
• Robot player implementations
• A serializable tree-structured log format
• A browser for exploring "what if" scenarios

Project status

This project is very much a work-in-progress. At this stage, it's just a playground for exercise & learning.

The idea is to provide reusable components for a card game engine. For now, the only card game implemented is euchre.

Most of the code here is prototype quality. I've never written a game engine. I've never designed or implemented a complex terminal UI. I'm getting pretty comfortable with Rust, but I'm no expert on ergonomics.

Quickstart

To run the game, simply:

$ cargo run

Demo

Basic gameplay:

During gameplay, you can open the history explorer with the ! key. You can seek to a point in history, and experiment with alternative choices. If you want to override the robot implementation, you can use @ to toggle robot autoplay.

Key Bindings

• ←↑→↓ / hjkl: Cursor navigation.
• ↵ / ␣: Select highlighted item.
• s: Saves the current round to euchre.json.
• !: Opens the history browser.
• @: Toggles robot autoplay.
• ?: What would the robot do?
• q: Quits the game (or closes the history browser).

To Do

Chores

• Improve test coverage.

Functionality

• Exploration mode features
  • Only offer at the end of round during normal gameplay.
  • Optionally display "hidden" state (other players' hands).
  • Edit other player's actions.
• Standalone exploration mode (from save file)
• Collapsible branches in history widget
  • Sigil? "(+N)" suffix?

Future

• Game abstraction layer
  • Common traits for core state machine & log functionality?
  • Wait until we add some more games. Hearts? Spades? Sheepshead?
• Robot implementation bakeoffs
• Play analysis & coaching
• Full game logs
• HTTP/JS frontend