SKRMSH released!

Surprise! I'm here to announce the early completion of my April 2016 #1GAM game, SKRMSH! This game (which, by the way, is pronounced "skirmish") is a simple card game for two players that I cooked up yesterday afternoon, and implemented in a BASIC script today over the course of about 3 or so hours. It is playable with a standard deck of 52 playing cards. Read on to find out the rules!

In SKRMSH, two players are each dealt a hand of 6 cards. Both players choose one of these cards to "bet" and a second one to "play," and lay these face down.

Standard 6-card starting hand.

The player (spoilers: me) has placed a "bet" card and has his
hand on the "play" card.

Both players flip their "play" cards at the same time, and the winner of the round is the player that has the higher value "play" card (Aces are low, face cards are scored as follows: Jack=11, Queen=12, King=13). The players then flip their "bet" cards, and the winner gains points equal to both "bet" cards put together. In the event of a tie, nobody gains any points. 

The players then set aside both of their "bet" and "play" cards and continue to play with their now-smaller hands. The "skirmish" ends when both players run out of cards in their hands (that is, after three rounds), and the cards are then shuffled back into the deck and another skirmish begins. There is no hard limit to the number of skirmishes that constitute a game, but at the end of the game, both players tabulate their scores, and the winner is the one with the higher total score.

Whew! Quite a wall of text, but SKRMSH is actually a very simple game. I didn't actually set out to make a new card game for this #1GAM game, though. I had actually intended to simply make a BASIC type-in game!

I'm 23, so I was born long after the microcomputer boom of the 70's and 80's. I have, however, always maintained an historical interest in this period, especially in the types of games available on these machines. I began thumbing through 101 BASIC Computer Games (an early edition of BASIC Computer Games) by David Ahl last month, and I was inspired to try and make my own simple BASIC game. I conceived that I would write the code, take a screenshot of it, and upload that here on my blog, thus preserving the "type-in" (that is, you, the end-user, have to enter the source code yourself, by hand) nature of these games.

I was originally going to implement the simple card game War, but I soon decided that doing so would be too easy. It also would be repetitive, because this game had already been created numerous times in the BASIC language. I then set to work fiddling with a deck of cards in my house, and came up with SKRMSH while trying to add more tactical depth to War. 

I finished my BASIC script for this game earlier this evening, and here is the promised source code screenshot!

Part 1

Part 2

There it is, in all its immune-to-copy-paste, probably-horribly-done-because-I'm-a-novice-at-BASIC glory! :) In all seriousness, I made this game as more of a personal hobby-project for myself, so I understand if nobody wants to go to the trouble of typing this in. Hopefully you can learn to play the game physically from my instructions above, even if you don't run the BASIC script. I played it with my family, and it seems to be pretty fun :)

If you DO decide to try to input the script above, I recommend you run it with the Vintage BASIC Interpreter, as it is what I used. I unfortunately do not have access to a real home computer that implements BASIC natively, but if you do and you get this program running on it, I would absolutely love to hear from you! Stuff like that delights me, cause I'm a nerd ;P

That's all for this week! I'll get this uploaded to the #1GAM site tomorrow, but right now, its already past my bedtime. Goodnight, everyone, and have a pleasant day tomorrow!