Sticks game

Sticks is a 2-player mathematical strategy game. It is played with a pile/heap of sticks, where players take turns removing sticks from the pile. The player to take the last stick from the pile loses. Each player must take at least one and at most t sticks. A game of Sticks is parametric over the number of initial sticks in the pile and the maximum number of sticks a player may take on their turn (called maxTake).

For demonstration and testing purposes, use a pile of 21 sticks and a maxTake rule of 3. That is, a player can take 1, 2, or 3 sticks on their turn.

Motivation

The game serves as a good introduction to programming concepts such as interfaces¹, inheritance², and polymorphism (see use of concrete player types as IPlayer in SticksGame). Students will use their knowledge of class structure to implement their own custom types with fields, constants, properties, constructors, and methods. This also offers reinforcement material for loops, conditional statements, and user interaction via the Console class.

The following topics are likely to be new material for students:

• Top-down design
• Creating non-static classes
• Interfaces
• Abstract classes, methods, and the override keyword
• Property usage
• Domain boundaries, e.g. validating a player's move in the SticksGame class instead of each IPlayer implementation
• Polymorphism

Teaching

1. Before coding the program, explain and demonstrate the game with sticks.
2. Explain top-down vs bottom-up design.
3. Have students create SticksRunner as the program entrypoint, and finish the body of SticksRunner.Main without implementing its dependencies.
4. Use the IDE code generation tools (found under "quick fix" or a context menu) to generate the classes and methods used inside SticksRunner.Main.
   • When implementing the static method SticksGame.Prompt, point out that we know it should be static because in Main it's called on the class, not an instance.

Sticks/Architecture.puml is a PlantUML diagram source describes the architecture of the project.

Requirements

1. Create the program entrypoint SticksRunner.Main().
   1. Interactively ask the player for the rules of their game using SticksGame.Prompt(string prompt).
   2. Instantiate a SticksGame with those rules using the SticksGame(int initialSticks, int maxTake) constructor.
   3. Run the game using the Run() method on the SticksGame instance.
2. Create fields in SticksGame:
   1. The class must have a public constant MinTake that equals 1.
   2. Use the constructor to initialize private fields readonly int _maxTake and int _sticks.

Footnotes

1. Sticks/Players/IPlayer.cs ↩

2. Sticks/Players/Bot.cs ↩