4 ms·
HN: Like playing Mancala? Review my new site. It is a side project.
- jacktasia 17y agoSince people seemed to like this non-Flash Go game ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678145 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678145 ) I thought I would try and see if I could get any reviews for my side project Mancala Time. I'll admit I submitted this (in a very early form) about 3 months ago but no one made any comments. Thanks.
- michael_dorfman 17y agoI thought the implementation looked very nice, although I hadn't played by those rules before. Well done.
- jacktasia 17y agoThanks for checking it out. Yeah, mancala is a genre of games. This is actually kalah, but most americans know this version as "mancala." If the site catches on I plan on adding Oware...which is my guess of the version that you are used to? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalah
- jcw 17y agoKalah is a simple and somewhat broken game (the first player is heavily favored). I would very much like to see Oware or Bao supported, these are much deeper mancala games. I haven't seen many implementations of Oware (outside of GNU Aware). The flash/java implementations of Bao also leave a little to be desired: http://www.baogame.com/ http://www.baogame.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_(mancala_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bao_(mancala_game)
- jacktasia 17y agoTrue story on Kalah being broken. This is the main reason why I added in the ability for users to be 2nd player. I will start to work on Oware sometime soon now that it seems like there is at real interest in it. Thanks.
- michael_dorfman 17y agoI've played a few different variants (some with 3 seeds, some with 4, some with captures, some without) but all of them involved "relay sowing".
- dfield 17y agoI like it... maybe you can improve the difficulty of your AIs some?
- jacktasia 17y agoThanks for checking it out. I do plan on improving them by using the list of moves that I record...I am thinking of making a Robot API or something too...but it's hard to be motivated to improve them too much when a large majority of people lose to Rex. This also makes the idea of finding the best move out of the moves that have occurred flawed (for now anyway) too.
- boredguy8 17y agoRex pretty much prioritizes getting a 'second move'. I've yet to see him protect against a capture.
- jacktasia 17y agoYeah, all he is capable of doing is finding an extra turn then it's basically pick one at random. Although, there's a bit of randomness mixed in. There's about a 1 in 6 chance that he will basically become a higher level robot on a given turn.
- dpcan 17y agoGotta love these CS 101 C++ projects becoming weekend web apps.
- dannyr 17y agoWhen I first saw the game, I though it was sungka from the Philippines. Apparently, they are very similar, if not the same, games. http://www.wikimanqala.org/wiki/Sungka http://www.wikimanqala.org/wiki/Sungka
- jacktasia 17y agoI had not heard of that version. Thanks for the link.