Inspiration
We were inspired by an obscure game we found in the Cool Board Games club at STAMP one day. It turned out to be really fun, so for our first hackathon together, we decided to do something unique and re-create the very enjoyable card game as a computer game.
What it does
The Take 6! computer game has a 4 x 6 board with a deck of 104 cards. The deck is shuffled and both players get a ten-card hand that they can each respectively see, but they cannot see the other player's hand. At the start of the game, the board has one card in each of the four rows faced up. Each round begins with both players selecting a card of their choosing from their hand and placing it faced down.
Once both players have done this, the cards are flipped over and the card with the lowest number goes first, automatically being placed into the row with the "smallest possible difference between the current last card and the new one," as stated by the rules of the game. Additionally, "the number of the card that is added to a row must be higher than the number of the current last card in that row," so our code automatically ensures that this is the case as well.
When a row hits 6 cards, the player who placed the 6th card must take all the cards in the row, earning a number of points based on the number of cow heads on each card in the row. Just like golf, in this game, more points is a bad thing. If a player plays a card whose number is lower than the last card of each of the four rows, the player has a choice in which row to place the card, after which they must take all the cards in the row. This allows the player to chose a row that would net them the least amount of points.
After 10 rounds have been played and neither player has any card left, the game is over. The winner is the player with the least amount of points.
How we built it
We built the game in Java by creating various classes to represent each object in the game. For example, we had a Card class to represent the different types of unique cards for this game and we had a Player class to represent each player's number, hand, and number of points. We used JFrame to make the GUI.
Challenges we ran into
A major challenge we ran into is that due to us being freshmen and only having taken intro-level computer science classes, we did not know much about GUIs and so we had to learn how to code them on the spot during the hackathon. We also had to create images for each of the 104 cards and learn how to import images to use in the GUI.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of having re-created such a complex and unique card game for our first hackathon together.
What we learned
We learned how to use GUIs in Java and how to create a complex computer game based on a card game without any reference to an existing computer version of the card game.
What's next for Take 6!
We're really excited about expanding the maximum number of players to 10 from the 2 we have now to allow even more people to take part in the fun! We also plan on adding animations to the game to make the game more smooth and more visually pleasing.
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