Board Game Challenge: Coerceo

Welcome to the first codelympics project challenge! We're really excited to see how this little experiment goes.

Please read through this entire readme first, before getting started. Consider it the final word on this challenge. It has important information on the game, the rules of the challenge, and how to submit your final project.

Understanding Coerceo

The first thing you should do is watch this 5-minute video. It explains the game rules and demonstrates how Coerceo is played. You can also refer to the full rulebook here.

We put up a very basic version of the game you can try out too. (Warning: there may be some bugs! The version we made is a side project, after all.) Yes, it's JavaScript- so please don't attempt to reverse engineer it for your solution! To play:

1. Click on this link to start a game. You'll start with the white pieces.

2. Copy the full URL from your browser with the room ID and send it to your friend. They will play as black. Or, you can play against yourself by opening the game URL in another tab/window.

3. You can send the same game URL to other people too, who can join as non-playing spectators.

##Getting Started

1. Fork this repo. Actually, that's pretty much it! You can work as you please within your fork.

##Rules for the Challenge

1. To complete the challenge successfully, you have to make a playable digital version of Coerceo by 11:59 PM PST on August 16th. This does not mean you are limited to a web app. You can make anything that can be played on a computer, phone, or tablet. For example, a mobile app or an ASCII terminal version would be fine too.

2. Don't cheat. We're all doing this for fun, so let's not mess it up. This means don't look at other people's forks during the challenge (you can keep your own repo local until the end if you are very concerned about cheaters). It also means anything else that a reasonable person would consider cheating. If you're not sure, just don't do it.

3. The necessary legalese. All copyrights, trademarks and rights to Coerceo belong to The Coerceo Company, registered #27351474 in the Netherlands.

##Challenge Categories and How to Compete

There are 3 prize categories- choose just 1 to compete in and follow the rules about modifying EDITME.md in order to be eligible. If EDITME.md hasn't been altered, we will assume you are not competing for any of the prize categories. If you just want to make Coerceo and not worry about any of these prize categories, that's totally fine! This challenge isn't really about the prizes anyway!

###Best Design

After the challenge is over, participants will be able to browse all forks on our website and vote on which has the best design. So to compete in this category, people will need to be able to see your version in action! The best way to do that would be to include a video and/or screenshots of the game being played in your EDITME.md file. You can also include a link to a live version if you have it hosted somewhere, or include instructions for getting it to run locally if you want. But video is probably the preferred way for most, and there are many free screencasting programs you can use to create this video, e.g. Kazam for Linux.

TODO: Alter EDITME.md with links to videos, live demos, screenshots, or however else you want to show off your awesome looking version of Coerceo!

###Best AI

We're going to play against your AI! We've played the game a bit at this point, and have certainly spent a lot of time thinking about it, so we feel we have a decent idea how to size an opponent up by now. If you want to compete in this category, please write up instructions as to how we can play against your AI in EDITME.md. We will play a few games against all submitted AIs and pick the one we feel is overall the best. No secret mechanical turking!

TODO: Alter EDITME.md with instructions how to play against your AI, whether you've hosted it somewhere, or want us to run it locally.

###Fewest Lines of Code

This one seems pretty self explanatory, but there are a few rules to go by here:

• Your copy must be "fully functional", meaning it accepts at least 1 human player's input (that 1 player can input for both white and black, or just for white and an AI can play black), and it must follow all of the rules in the Coerceo rule book (so, only valid moves should be possible, tiles must be removed as the game progresses, etc.) It must also somehow display the board state as moves are made.
• 80 character limit per line, if a line goes over 80 characters we will count it as the number of characters divided by 80 rounded up lines. E.g., a 161 character line would count as 3 lines.
• Write "fewest" in EDITME.md

TODO: Alter EDITME.md so it just says "fewest", or otherwise let us know with that file you intend to compete in this category.

###Prizes

Each winner of the above 3 categories will receive a copy of an exclusive collector's edition of Coerceo from the game maker. We'll also shout their names from all the ramparts in the realm.

##Resources The full Coerceo rulebook

The artwork folder in this repo. It has default images provided to use for this challenge by The Coerceo Company that you can use if you don't want to make your own (for example, if you want to focus on making an AI player instead). Note that your chances of winning the design category will probably not be as good as someone who makes their own assets.

##Fun Stuff During the Challenge Working on this alone for 10 days can get lonely. So to keep things lively during the challenge, we'll have a few things going on.

###IRC We'll be hanging out on freenode in the #codelympics channel, so that will be the best place to reach us throughout the challenge and chat with other people working on it. If you do not have an IRC client, freenode also has a webchat available here.

###Our Own Subreddit The codelympics subreddit will be the main place for asynchronous communication. We'll be posting interesting stuff tangentially relevant to the challenge. It's also where you can ask questions or engage in conversations about the challenge.

The game designer and maker in the Netherlands will be on the subreddit too, so we'll have a special thread dedicated to asking them questions about the game, or about making games in general- game designers are fun people to talk to!

###Email Email us at [email protected] with any questions you have.

###Mentorship If you get really badly stuck, we don't want you to give up. So we have a few mentors (read: us and our friends) available. We're happy to look at what you've done and bounce ideas. We will not give answers away directly, but we can help point you in the right direction if you are horribly lost. You can reach us with your questions through IRC, the subreddit, or email.

###Coerceo Tournament

We'll be organizing a friendly tournament using the online version of Coerceo we put up. We'll send out details about the tournament and how to sign up later on during the challenge.