tak.hs

CLI version of Tak (the board game) playable in hot-seat mode. Written in Haskell to practice.

Warning: this game's still in development. So you may still stumble upon a few rough edges.

Here's what it looks like:

P1's deck: 17 1C
P2's deck: 16 1c

5 . f . . .
4 . f . . .
3 . F F . .
2 . . f F .
1 s F . . .
  a b c d e

Fancy isn't it? Let's discover what this beautiful ASCII art means in the following sections. But first, don't forget to read the rules otherwise it won't make any sense. Also, there's no Artificial Intelligence support yet, so you need to find a local friend ;)

Install

This project is managed by Stack:

• git clone this repository
• stack build to generate the binaries
• stack test to run the HUnit tests (optional)

Usage

stack exec tak-exe to launch the game stack exec tak-exe -- --colors to launch the game with colors stack exec tak-exe -- --big to launch the game with full stacks displayed in overview

Size of the board

At the beginning we need to choose the size of the board we want to play:

Welcome to Tak.hs
Size of the board? [3..8]

Let's enter a number between 3 and 8 (both included), and we're ready to go!

Board view

In the first two lines we see stones counters in each player decks. 1C means that 1 capstone is available. Uppercase letters belong to Player 1 and lowercase letters belong to Player 2.

Below, the empty board is displayed (here with 5 size) with coordinates on both axes.

P1's deck: 21 1C
P2's deck: 21 1c

5 . . . . .
4 . . . . .
3 . . . . .
2 . . . . .
1 . . . . .
  a b c d e

Prompt

This is the prompt, it displays the current turn and which player should enter a command.

turn 1 / P1>

Commands

The game has just started and the board is empty. Let's fill it! It's Player 1's turn.

place

To add a stone to the board, use the place command with a valid xy coordinates.

turn 1 / P1> place b2

5 . . . . .
4 . . . . .
3 . . . . .
2 . f . . .
1 . . . . .
  a b c d e

By default the place add a flat stone. If we want to precise the type of stone, we just prepend its initial before the coordinates:

turn 1 / P2> place sc2

5 . . . . .
4 . . . . .
3 . . . . .
2 . f S . .
1 . . . . .
  a b c d e

sxy will place a standing stone, cxy will place a capstone.

Currently there are two stones on the board:

• b2 is a flat stone, belonging to Player 2.
• c2 is a Standing stone, belonging to Player 1.

Remember that in the Tak rules, on the first turn we must place a stone belonging to the opponent.

Let's add a few more:

turn 2 / P1> place b4
turn 2 / P2> place d2
turn 3 / P1> place b3
turn 3 / P2> place b1

5 . . . . .
4 . F . . .
3 . F . . .
2 . f S f .
1 . f . . .
  a b c d e

We can only place stones from our deck to empty cells. So what's next?

move

We want to move some stones for sure! It's Player 1's turn. What about stacking the flat stone in b4 on top of the one in b3?

turn 4 / P1> move b4-

This move command interprets Portable Tak Notation

To move we must at least indicate our starting point and a direction:

• + means North
• - means South
• > means East
• < means West

So in our case, we started from b4 and went south:

5 . . . . .
4 . . . . .
3 . F . . .
2 . f S f .
1 . f . . .
  a b c d e

We could precise how many stones we want to take from the starting stack. So move b4- and move 1b4- are equivalent. If you take more than one stone and want to decide how to spread them on the board, append a series of number to your command. For example 4e5<121 means "take 4 stones from e5 and spread them to the west, leaving 1 stone, then 2 stones and finally 1 stone". Again, please refer the PTN docs for more information on this notation.

But wait? It seems like a stone has disappeared from the board! Don't panic, it still here! The issue we face is that Tak is 3D game and for now we only have a 2D bird view. The letters we see only represent the top stone of each cell. In this view there are no way to tell the height of a stack on a cell. Introducing the show command…

show

The show command is designed to see the board from the side:

turn 4 / P2> show b

    F
. . F f f
5 4 3 2 1

All is clearer now. There are two stones on b3. We could also inspect the row to see an alternative view:

turn 4 / P2> show 3

  F
. F . . .
a b c d e

options

During runtime you can enable/disable options:

turn 4 / P2> set colors true
turn 4 / P2> set colors false

Have a good game! For any questions or suggestions, feel free to open a GH issue