Quinto

Quinto is based on the 1960s 3M board game of the same name, simplest to describe as a numeric version of Scrabble. This is currently the only known electronic implementation of Quinto.

Demo

A demo is available at: http://quinto.herokuapp.com

You can access the server via a browser or the included command line client to play online against other users.

Setup

The Quinto server is a nodejs application, so you'll need to install nodejs first. After installing node, run:

npm install

That will install the other dependencies (pg, coffeescript, express, bcrypt, and fibers). The default persistence backend uses JSON files in the filesystem, and you can create the necessary directory structure via:

mkdir tmp/{,emails,players,games}

There is also a PostgreSQL backend, which you can use via:

create_db quinto
psql < schema.sql quinto

To enable the PostgreSQL backend, set the DATABASE_URL environment variable before running the app.

The command line interface requires optimist:

npm install optimist

This is only required if want to connect to a remote server using the command line interface.

Running the Server

To run the server:

node server.js

or:

coffee app.coffee

By default, the server runs on port 3000, you can set the PORT environment variable to override it.

Running the command line client

The shell.coffee file includes two ways of playing on the command line:

• Local mode, giving you a coffee REPL, and allowing you to play both sides of a two person game.
• Remote mode, allowing you to connect to a server, and play against other users (who may be using a browser or the command line interface)

For local mode, just start coffee and require the file:

coffee -r ./shell.coffee

For remote mode, you can pass some options and a URL:

Usage: coffee ./shell.coffee [options] [url]

Options:
  -u  username/email                         [string]  [required]
  -p  password                               [string]
  -g  game id                                [string]
  -n  start new game against other player(s) [string]
  -r  register new user                      [boolean]

If you don't provide a URL, it will use the demo server at http://quinto.herokuapp.com as the server.

If you don't provide a game id, it will show you a list of game ids and related player emails, and you can then run the client again providing the gameId.

If you don't provide the password on the command line (which is a good idea for security reasons), it will prompt you to enter one.

Security

Quinto is designed as a single page application. Registration requires a password, which is hashed with bcrypt. The password is used for initial login, but after that, a randomly generated token is used for authentication. The token is currently per user, a more secure method would be to generate a random token per user per game.

Obviously, to have any security at all, you have to host the server using SSL. The default app does not do this, you need to put a reverse proxy (e.g. nginx) in front of the app to handle SSL. The demo app also does not do this, and should be considered insecure.

Tests

Quinto uses Jasmine for unit tests and capybara (written in ruby) for integration tests. You can run all test suites using the cake all task.

Source

The most current source code can be accessed via github (http://github.com/jeremyevans/quinto/).

Author

Jeremy Evans (code@jeremyevans.net)