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5.5: The Player Class

  • Page ID
    15302
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    The classes we have defined so far could be used for any card game; we have not yet implemented any of the rules specific to Crazy Eights. And that’s probably a good thing, since it makes it easy to reuse these classes if we want to make another game in the future.

    But now it’s time to implement the rules. We’ll use two classes: Player, which encapsulates player strategy, and Eights, which creates and maintains the state of the game. Here is the beginning of the Player definition:

    public class Player {
    
        private String name;
        private Hand hand;
    
        public Player(String name) {
            this.name = name;
            this.hand = new Hand(name);
        }
    

    A Player has two private attributes: a name and a hand. The constructor takes the player’s name as a string and saves it in an instance variable. In this example, we have to use this to distinguish between the instance variable and the parameter with the same name.

    The primary method that Player provides is play, which decides which card to discard during each turn:

    public Card play(Eights eights, Card prev) {
        Card card = searchForMatch(prev);
        if (card == null) {
            card = drawForMatch(eights, prev);
        }
        return card;
    }
    

    The first parameter is a reference to the Eights object that encapsulates the state of the game. We’ll need it if we have to draw a new card. The second parameter, prev, is the card on top of the discard pile.

    Using top-down development, we’ll have play invoke two helper methods, searchForMatch and drawForMatch. searchForMatch looks in the player’s hand for a card that matches the previously played card:

    public Card searchForMatch(Card prev) {
        for (int i = 0; i < hand.size(); i++) {
            Card card = hand.getCard(i);
            if (cardMatches(card, prev)) {
                return hand.popCard(i);
            }
        }
        return null;
    }
    

    The strategy is pretty simple: the for loop searches for the first card that’s legal to play and returns it. If there are no cards that match, it returns null. And in that case, we have to draw cards until we get a match:

    public Card drawForMatch(Eights eights, Card prev) {
        while (true) {
            Card card = eights.draw();
            System.out.println(name + " draws " + card);
            if (cardMatches(card, prev)) {
                return card;
            }
            hand.addCard(card);
        }
    }
    

    The while loop runs until it finds a match (we’ll assume for now that it always does). It uses the Eights object to draw a card. If it matches, it returns the card. Otherwise it adds the card to the player’s hand and continues.

    Both searchForMatch and drawForMatch use cardMatches, which is a static method, also defined in Player. cardMatches is a straightforward translation of the rules of the game:

    public static boolean cardMatches(Card card1, Card card2) {
        if (card1.getSuit() == card2.getSuit()) {
            return true;
        }
        if (card1.getRank() == card2.getRank()) {
            return true;
        }
        if (card1.getRank() == 8) {
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
    

    Finally, Player provides score, which computes penalty points for cards left in a player’s hand at the end of the game:

    public int score() {
        int sum = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < hand.size(); i++) {
            Card card = hand.getCard(i);
            int rank = card.getRank();
            if (rank == 8) {
                sum -= 20;
            } else if (rank > 10) {
                sum -= 10;
            } else {
                sum -= rank;
            }
        }
        return sum;
    }
    

    This page titled 5.5: The Player Class is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Allen B. Downey (Green Tea Press) .

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