A C++ template library for the games of draughts and checkers, supporting almost all known rules variations, board sizes and game objectives.
This library is currently in a pre-alpha stage. All code is subject to change without prior notice.
Draughts is a family of related board games played in many regions across the world:
- There are many country-specific game rules such as International/Brazilian/Canadian, American/English, Russian, Italian, Spanish/Portugese, Czech, Thai, and Frisian draughts.
- Draughts is played on checkered boards of dimensions 8x8, 10x10 and 12x12.
- The common game objective is "the first player to have no moves left, loses". A less common variation is so-called misère play ("first to have no moves left, wins"), also known as "suicide", "giveaway", or "qui-perd-gagné".
Many draughts variants have an official governing body, such as the Fédération Mondiale du Jeu de Dames (FMJD, World Draughts Federation).
The DCTL supports all above mentioned draughts variants with official rules, on all board sizes up to 18x18. Most existing draughts variants have a high percentage of draws when played between experienced players. Historically, many small tweaks to the game rules have been proposed. Even former world champions such as Herman Hoogland proposed new variants. The DCTL supports some of these variants. In particular, the recently proposed Killer Draughts is actively supported.
The DCTL provides a series of C++ templates to define the board geometry and game rules of draughts variants. With these templates, one can read and write draughts positions from so-called FEN strings using Portable Draughts Notation. Once a position variable has been initialized with such a FEN string, the DCTL provides further templates to analyze them using a search algorithm, which is supported by a typical board game engine infrastructure of e.g. a move generator, evaluation function and hash table.
Consult the test-suite sources (under the
dctl/testdirectory) for concrete usage examples.
The DCTL does not yet provide a fully functioning game engine that can be plugged into a GUI. It is currently not possible to play a game against a program based on the DCTL. Functionality being planned includes:
- a generic engine class template
- support for the Checkerboard GUI
- support for the GUIDE protocol
- support for the DamExchange protocol
- endgame database generation
These header-only libraries depend on the C++ Standard Library and Boost and are continuously being tested with the following conforming conforming C++20 compilers:
| Platform | Compiler | Versions | Build |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux | GCC | 11, 12, 13-SVN | CI currently being ported to GitHub Actions |
| Linux | Clang | 16-SVN | CI currently being ported to GitHub Actions |
Clone the dctl and the bit_set, tabula and xstd repositories as dependencies to a directory of your choice:
cd ~/projects/
git clone https://github.com/rhalbersma/dctl.git
git clone https://github.com/rhalbersma/bit_set.git
git clone https://github.com/rhalbersma/tabula.git
git clone https://github.com/rhalbersma/xstd.git
To make sure that your build environment is compatible with the DCTL requirements, the DCTL comes with an extensive suite of unit tests, placed in the dctl/test sub-directory. To build and run the test-suite, follow the requirements (in particular: compile Boost.Test), and type (where -j N builds on N cores in parallel)
cd dctl
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . -j N
ctest -E "search|traversal"
The build will take less than a minute on a 3.5 GHz Intel i7 (and longer for systems with less parallelism). The test-suite itself takes a second to run. Note that the ctest command excludes all unit tests that do a tree search or traversal (these tests will take several minutes to hours to run, respectively). If you do not see any errors, the tests succeeded. Congratulations: your system supports the DCTL, and you are now ready to start coding!
Any feature requests, ideas and contributions are much appreciated! The recommended way to contribute code is through GitHub pull requests.
Special thanks to Aart Bik, Ed Gilbert, Fabien Letouzey, Walter Thoen and Wieger Wesselink for encouragement, testing, and exchange of ideas.
Copyright Rein Halbersma 2010-2023. Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)