I've written board games before, like Tic Tac Toe and Battleship, and I've found I like working with boards, games, and generally things that make their needs clear. So with the solo challenge at DBC this week being to write a Bingo class, I was pretty happy. Here's some sample output from the middle of a game (because I think it's pretty cute):
Here's what my Bingo class looks like:
It feels pretty complicated to look at, and at some point I might think about
refactoring it to be more simple. I designed it to be entirely driven from outside,
but it would be easy to add a play_game method to it so that the game logic is also
contained inside it. For now, I put the game logic outside of it:
My biggest struggle with this was that generating a random location turned out to be
more complicated than one would hope. Simply generating a location using
rand(1..100) and "bingo".chars.sample turned out to be way
too random for my board! I went through 250 moves without a single move matching up with
my board. Instead, I made the generate_letter method that metaphorically
flips a coin: it generates a number between 1 and 10 and, if it is prime, chooses a location on the
board that matches letter to number. Otherwise, it generates a random bingo column letter
and matches it to one of the numbers on the board, which more often than not doens't land
on anything. So from the user perspectice, it takes about 30 moves to win, and yet you're not
getting x's on each round, so it feels more randomized.