Poblano

Poblano, a Pygame clone of the board game Abalone

About the game

From Wikipedia: "Abalone is a two-player strategy board game which can be quaintly summarized as 'sumo wrestling with marbles', as the objective is to push opposing marbles off the edge of the board. The rules can be mastered in a minute or two, and the flow of the game is fast-paced."

As with Conway's Game of Life, Abalone has a simple ruleset and rich resulting behavior. Although the default configuration has been known to lead to stalemates, for alternate configurations used in championship matches Abalone is as yet an unsolved game. We'd like to bring this exciting and interesting game to the XO.

Plan for Game Jam

Objectives:

• Basic UI and graphics
• Encode Abalone ruleset
• Additional program logic
• Splash screen or intro animation
• Alternate start configurations Abalone Rule Variations
• Computer player AI

Rules for Abalone

From Wikipedia Abalone Official Rules

Board: 61 circles, 5/side

    I O O O O O
   H O O O O O O
  G + + O O O + +
 F + + + + + + + +
E + + + + + + + + +
 D + + + + + + + + 9
  C + + @ @ @ + + 8
   B @ @ @ @ @ @ 7
    A @ @ @ @ @ 6
       1 2 3 4 5

14 marbles/player

Toss for color, black moves first Players move in turn Once played, a move cannot be changed

“Move”: line of one, two, or 3 marbles one space inline or broadside Numerical superiority (three to two, three to one, or two to one) allows a push. Push ONLY inline, NOT broadside. Pushing is not allowed if: There is no free space behind your opponent's group. There is an empty space between your group and the opponent's. The marbles are not in line.

"Pac": inline marbles deadlocked for that line (1:1, 2:2, 3:3)

Winner: first to push 6 opposing marbles off.

Development

For the latest source code, see our SVN folder.

The good news: the ruleset works. The program is stable, and we worked out most of the rendering glitches.

The less good news: the code is still basically what you'd expect after three days of rushed development: a bloody hack. We simply have not found time to work on it since Game Jam.

Code

Function-level encapsulation is pretty good; module-level encapsulation is wanting and the flow of execution and data doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm dissatisfied with the coordinate mapping system I chose, and would like to rewrite things entirely in terms of a linearly dependent set of 3 cardinal vectors. At some point we anticipate an extensive reorganization and reimplementation, hopefully with the aid of someone considerably more skilled with Pygame design than either of us.

Artwork

We need:

• A logo, splash screen and player avatars (I really liked Mel's depiction of a dueling chili and sweet pepper).
• Something off to the sides of the screen to hold dead marbles
• A scoreboard
• Effects for knocking marbles off the board (an explosion of pepper seeds was suggested