Fifty Solitaires – A Beginning

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Many years ago, when I was a physics student and I was just getting to know the ins and outs of programming, I made a bet with a friend of mine. At the time my mother was into solitaire card games, the ones with real cards you play on the kitchen table. This was before everyone had a computer with a built-in little solitaire game. She was given a book with the rules of 50 different games. The bet I made with my friend was this. During the summer holidays, I would be able to write a solitaire game for the computer. The game would not just allow the player to play one type of card game. No, the game should contain all 50 different rules. The stake of the bet was a crate of beer.

So when the holidays started, I set about writing the game. The programming language at the time was Turbo Pascal and the user interface was character-based with special symbols used to create the graphical appearance of the cards. Turbo Pascal was object-oriented, allowed to react to mouse interactions and, as far as I recall, provided an event-based API for implementing the user interface. At the end of the summer holidays, I had a working solitaire game and I enjoyed my well-earned crate of beer with my friends. I had also gained lots of experience in application development and object-oriented programming. Unfortunately, the game does not exist anymore. It was stored on old 5.25-inch floppy disks which after some years became unreadable.

Game design

Today, I want to recreate the game and make it available for anyone to play. Of course, I won’t be using Turbo Pascal and character-based GUIs. I am going for a JavaScript-based game that will be using React for the user interface. For most of my life, I have been programming in strongly typed languages, so I am going to use TypeScript which adds typing to JavaScript applications and makes everything a bit more predictable.

In recent times, the functional programming style has become popular in the JavaScript community, especially when React is being used. I want to try and follow this style for the front-end. I was thinking about using Redux to manage the state of the application. Redux imposes its own functional programming model which is based on reducers. I think Redux is great for many types of web applications.

On the other hand, I still believe that an object-oriented approach is ideal to capture the logic of something like a solitaire game. Let’s think about the way you would implement the game rules. In solitaire, you play different stacks of cards on the table. Each stack might have different attributes that describe its appearance. For instance, a stack may contain cards facing up or facing down. The stack might be spread to reveal some or all of the cards. Then there are the game rules. A stack might allow dropping a card onto it if it meets certain criteria. Or you may be able to pick up a card. Or maybe you can turn over cards that end up in a separate stack.

These rules are independent of appearance and should not be implemented in the front-end. Rather there should be some model that controls the game logic. To me, it feels natural that the model of a card stack should somehow have the rules available at its fingertips. What better way to do this than by creating classes that represent the rules and then implementing the specific rule variants using inheritance.

Creating the Game Skeleton

So, there you go. The game will be written in TypeScript using React, but no other framework will be used. I will be managing the application state directly in the object model that implements the game rules. And I will make that model flexible enough so that I can implement all game variations, simply by plugging different objects together. In the end, I want to be able to read JSON files that specify the rules and construct a game without having to write any additional code.

For today, I will only create the GitHub repo and initialise the skeleton React application. First, I created an empty repository at https://github.com/holgerschmitz/fifty-solitaires

Then, in the folder on my computer where I keep all my source code, I open the terminal and run

npx create-react-app fifty-solitaires --template typescript --use-npm

The command create-react-app is a useful tool for starting a new React project. Apart from setting up the toolchain for the application, it also sets up a local git repository. I still need to tell git, where the upstream of the project lives. To do this, I navigate into the new project folder and run the following two commands.

git remote add origin git@github.com:holgerschmitz/fifty-solitaires.git
git push -u origin master

I will also be using SCSS for styling. This makes it possible to keep colour definitions and other useful mixins in one place. The command for including SCSS in this project is

npm install node-sass --save

This is it for now. You can look at the repository on GitHub. I invite you to think about the next steps and how you would approach implementing the game.


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