Chinese Checkers

A board game written in C. It can be compiled with two different user interfaces. One for the GNU/Linux CLI using ncurses.h, and a GUI using SDL. I decided to code this game after having bought a material, wooden one, because CLI games are cool, and because I had no idea how a program could represent a hexagon grid. A fantastic resource about this subject is this page on Red Blob Games.

Installation

$ git clone http://github.com/ribacq/chinese-checkers.git
$ make [tui|gui]
$ ./chinese-checkers.out

Rules

It’s actually from Germany, and was originally called, ‘Stern-Halma’, at the time of its creation in 1892.

Setup

Chinese checkers is played on a 6-branch star where every cell has 6 neighbors. The game can be played by 2, 3, 4 or 6 players. Each player owns 10 pieces of their own color, placed on a star corner of the board. The camps are simmetrically set around the board. When there are 2, 4 or 6 players, their camps must face one another, but in the case of 3 players, they are all placed opposite an empty space.

Goal

A player wins when all of their pieces get to the star corner opposite their starting camp.

Game

The game is played in turns. On their turn, a player has to move a single one of their pieces on the board. For such a move their are two choices:

• Move a single piece from its current location to an adjacent cell, or
• Proceed to a series of jumps:
  • All jumps of a series use the same piece;
  • A jump can be made by a piece from its current location over a directly adjacent piece, whose color is indifferent;
  • The jumping piece lands directly behind the jumped piece, in the opposite direction where there has to be a free cell;
  • The jumped piece remains unchanged.

That’s it!