The cardwords game - Chapter 1
Introduction

cardwords is a card game for your computer running Linux (it will probably run on other flavors of Unix, too).

This software is in alpha state. It is possible to play a game against the computer or against other players over the net, but it is not very comfortable yet.

cardwords is a client/server based program. The server accepts connections from clients all over the internet and manages the game. One client can authenticate as the owner and that client's user can do some administrative jobs such as deciding to add words to the dictionary of valid words while the others can not. You can play against other people over the internet or against as many computer generated robots as you like. Or against a mix of both.

I want to have different clients in the long run. At the moment there is only a gtk client which requires xwindows with scalable fonts, gtk+ and gtk--. I would like to have also a text mode client using ncurses or inside emacs.

In the game you get cards showing a character and points. You try to lay words with them on the table in a crossword-like way.

You can customize the game. However, this has currently to be done by editing some text files. I want to have tools for this task in the long run, but for customizing the game now, I will describe the format of the various files concerned in Customizing cardwords, chapter 3.

These files are

• a charset file which contains the characters that can form the words,

• one or more dictionary files of valid words,

• a file that lists all existing cards,

• a file containing information about the card-table,

• a file specifying bonus and penalty points for certain actions and (implicitly) the number of cards everybody gets handed out.