Metro Dice is an implementation of the board/card game Machi Koro. Machi Koro was designed by Masao Suganuma and published by IDW Games, Grounding Inc, and Pandasaurus Games in the U.S., and many others elsewhere.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/143884/machi-koro
Currently there's only text-mode clients available. The preferred one is
a "TUI" (Terminal User Interface), and can be run with metrodice-tui.py.
The other is an even-more-basic console app which can be run with
metrodice-cli.py. The TUI app is more featureful, though. At the
moment, though, they're both only a pass-and-play apps, so if you wanted
to play with a friend you'd have to be sitting right next to each other,
at which point you may as well just play a physical Machi Koro instead,
yeah? I suppose you could share a tmux or screen session.
This is currently what you should expect from the TUI app:
The TUI app, as you can probably see, does require a pretty sizeable terminal to work properly - in fact, a default 80x24 xterm is too small and the app'll crash. The various areas of the screen should be scrollable, though.
Metro Dice is programmed in Python (currently only tested in Python 3, though I don't think I'm using anything which would cause problems in Python 2). The TUI client uses Python's "urwid" module, and the more-basic CLI app uses Python's "colorama" module for coloring.
Metro Dice is, charitably, a work in progress. It was programmed
barreling headlong into the code without much, if any, thought as to
overall architecture and sensibility. At the moment, the players,
expansion to use, and market style to use are just hardcoded up at the
top of the TextMode or CLI classes (depending on which app you launch).
Extremely questionable implementation details abound. In its favor, though:
- It does work.
- There's at least a bare minimum of backend/frontend separation (implementing a GUI frontend shouldn't require any modifications to the game logic files.
- Unit tests are coming along - at the moment they cover cards, markets, and actions, but is missing the core game library. It's getting there, slowly!
At the moment it implements the base Machi Koro game plus the Harbor
expansion, which is the mode that's enabled by default. It additionally
supports using a Bright Lights, Big City style market, though you'll have
to change the definition in CLI to enable that. I'll likely be
adding in Millionaire's Row cards as well, and probably a full Bright
Lights, Big City setting. Also, you know, making it an actually
reasonable app instead of a glorified bit of spaghetti.