bjhufstetler 2/12/2020
A shiny (Chang et al. 2019) app to play the new hit trading card game, Bare Bones, created by bjhufstetler and available for purchase summer 2020.
This app was created as a submission for the 2020 shiny contest.
To run the application locally use:
shiny::runGitHub(repo = "bjhufstetler/BareBones")Bare Bones is played by each player placing hexagonal cards, one at a time, onto a grid adjacent to previously played cards. The first card played is called the anchor and must be placed in the center of the grid. Each player is dealt six cards but only have access to two at a time. When a card is placed, its edges are evaluated against their neighbors to determine if any points are scored. Players can score points by matching edge numbers or placing higher edge numbers against existing cards. The player with the most points after all cards are played is the winner. The first player to lay down a card wins in the event of a tie.
The first player is chosen randomly using runif(1) < 0.5. The first
player is given two bonus points and wins in the event of a tie. Again
the first card must be placed in the center of the grid.
Cards can be selected by clicking on one of the cards on the left side of the screen. This is your hand. You may rotate the cards by pressing the left or right arrows on your keyboard. Cards may be placed in any of the red hexagons on the grid, and in any orientation.
Chits are used to track each player’s score. You are placing white chits and trying to capture black chits. A chit is placed on a card when it is first laid down. Additional chits may be placed onto or removed from neighboring cards given the overpowering and matching rules described in the next section.
Multiple players may have chits on the same card but they cannot have more than one chit on a single card. If you have the opportunity to place a second chit on a card containing an opponent’s chit, you capture the opponent’s chit, removing it from the board and adding it to your score.
A card is overpowered when a card is placed along its edge containing a higher number on the shared edge. When a card is overpowered, the player who placed the overpowering card places a chit of their color onto the overpowered card.
If at least two edges of a newly placed card match the numbers on previously played cards, then a chit may be placed on each of the matched cards, and the matched cards may attempt to overpower their neighbors as if the matched cards had just been played. All edges of a matched card may be evaluated, thus, if two matched cards are adjacent to one another, one may overpower the other.
The AI uses a greedy algorithm but occassionally makes sub-optimal decisions. Bare Bones is a game of chance and skill. It has been empirically shown to be evenly balanced when each player uses the same strategy and card distribution.
Bare Bones will be going on sale in the Summer of 2020 as a physical trading card game. The same rules apply with the addition that when a game is played, the winner will take posession of one of their opponent’s cards (of the winner’s choosing). There are five large pieces of artwork in the initial release, each of which has been cut up into hexagons and randomly distributed into the packs being sold. The goal is to complete each work of art.
The code used in this application was originally adapted from a contest submission last year by dreamRs (dreamRs 2019).
All artwork created by Eldyn Park.
Chang, Winston, Joe Cheng, JJ Allaire, Yihui Xie, and Jonathan McPherson. 2019. Shiny: Web Application Framework for R. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=shiny.
dreamRs. 2019. “DreamRs/Memory-Hex.” GitHub. https://github.com/dreamRs/memory-hex.