Snakes and ladders is an ancient south Asian board game. It consists of 10X10 grid board which contains some snakes and ladders at specific boxes/indexes. One hundred is the maximum and a must to win score for each player. First player reaching 100 gets to win the game and is immediately declared as first Winner.
Following are a few basic features of the game;
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Dice Board: A board that display the boxes. Each box can either contain a number (1-100) or a player’s pawn and a special field to represent presence of snake head or leader tail.
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Snakes: Any player’s pawn landing at a special box which have snake head will result in a severe loss in player score.
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Leader: Any player’s pawn landing at a special box which have leader tail will result in a significant increase in player score.
The game board is implemented by using a 4D linked list (next, previous, up & down pointers):
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Each node next points to the next box containing the next number.
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Each node previous points to the previous box containing the previous number.
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Each node has the up pointer set to null by default except the special nodes which are in path of a ladder. Such nodes up pointers formulate the complete leader path. Hence any player landing at a special node with ladder tail flag will move up in the path with the help of up pointers until it reaches the top of ladder.
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Each node has the down pointer set to null by default except the special nodes which are in path of a snake. Such nodes down pointers formulate the complete snake. Hence any player landing at a special node with snake head flag will move down in the path with the help of down pointers until it reaches the tail of the snake.
The game can be played between any numbers of players (>=2). The turns of players will be handled by using Queues (Implement using Arrays). The game will not end until we have winners.
- 2 Players: Game will end when one player reaches 100.
- 3 Players: Game will end when we have first and second winner.
- 4 or greater: Game will end when we have first, second and third winner.
The dice rolling will be a simple random number generator; which generate number from 1 to 6.
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Each player will have to get a 6 or 1 on dice roll exactly in order to enter the board. The very first 6 of each player will be considered 1 which means each player will start the game from box 1.
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A player gets to roll the dice again; if he gets a 6. Each dice roll will be pushed in the diceRoll Stack. Assume a player rolls 6, 6 & 4. The player pawn will move in accordance with the stack popped dice roll. In our case, player pawn will first move 4 boxes then 6 boxes and then 6 boxes.
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If a player roll consecutive 6 exactly three times; he will lose his current turn.
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However, if a player roll consecutive 6 exactly four times; next player will lose his turn. Assume Player B has turn after Player A. Player A rolled consecutive 6 exactly four times and then any number. Player B will end up losing his turn.
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If any player roll sum in a specific turn is divisible by three; the player turn queue will reverse itself. Assume, the player turn queue is as follows:
P1 | P2 | P3 | P4
P1 rolls the dice and ends up getting the roll sum which is divisible by three. The player pawn will move according to the rule b, c & d. Once P1 has completed his turn, the turn queue will reverse itself:
P4 | P3 | P2 | P1
Now the next turn will be of P4 and not P2.
The game layout or map is read from the file map.txt where every cell is represented with its number and an 'S' or 'L' indicates a snake or ladder at that position.
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