George Boole Has Entered The Chat — terminal version

The third sibling to web/ (adenosine, browser) and wii/ (magnolia, C99). Runs entirely in a shell — no graphics, just characters — in the tradition of AsciiPatrol, Cataclysm:DDA and the rest of the command-line-only canon.

pipx install magmacrunch-george-boole
george-boole

pipx rather than pip because it puts the command on your PATH in its own virtualenv; plain pip install only reaches your PATH inside an activated venv. It is also a cabinet in the magmacrunch arcade — pipx install magmacrunch gets this and the other two — and plays identically either way.

For working on it:

pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m boole          # or the installed `george-boole` command

Published as magmacrunch-george-boole — prefixed because PyPI has no scoping like the npm @magmacrunch/… packages, and unprefixed names get taken (adenosine and magnolia both already belong to someone else there). The import package stays plain boole.

That opens the title screen, where you pick one of the eight modes. Naming a mode is an instruction to play it, so --mode skips straight into a game:

python -m boole --mode gauntlet
python -m boole --mode byte --seed 42     # a reproducible run

How to play is the last row of the mode list, or H from anywhere on the title screen. It carries the browser build's quick rules and a gate table — the gates are in the HUD during a game, but the HUD is not where you go to find out what they mean. It scrolls, because the rules are longer than a standard terminal is tall.

High scores are kept on disk, so a record outlives the session. One board for the whole game with the mode on each row, rather than eight — crumb and byte are not different games, they are the same game at different widths, and a single ranked list says which width somebody was brave enough to play at. Filed under george-boole, the same key the browser build posts to. Reach it from the menu or with B.

On the title screen

In a game

Best scores are kept per mode for as long as the process runs, and shown on both screens.

Needs a terminal at least 59x20 for the board, 44x18 for the menu. Below that it says so rather than drawing a clipped screen. Truecolor is used for the value ramp but not required.

Launchable by an arcade

The game declares itself through an entry point, so anything enumerating magmacrunch.games finds it:

[project.entry-points."magmacrunch.games"]
george-boole = "boole.arcade:GAME"

It does not own the terminal. A texastoast.core.tui_host.TuiHost does, and BooleApp is handed one — which is what lets the same code run as its own command and be seated by a launcher without knowing which happened. Esc from the mode menu ends a standalone session and returns to the arcade menu under a launcher, and the game does not have to know the difference: it pops a scene and the host decides what that means.

How it is built

The engine is texastoast with its terminal backend (pip install "texastoast[tui]", which this package depends on). The game draws through texastoast's Renderer/UISurface protocols and never touches a terminal library directly, so the planned hand-written ANSI backend will be a swap rather than a rewrite.

boole/
  board.py   the Boolean rules — pure Python, no engine, no terminal
  modes.py   bit modes and their tuning tables
  theme.py   palette and layout, in character cells
  scenes.py  MenuScene and GameScene — the two screens
  app.py     wiring: the game, the renderer, the scene stack
tests/
  test_board.py   the rule set, pinned
  test_app.py     the screens, driven headlessly

board.py and modes.py import nothing outside the standard library. That is enforced by a test, and it is what lets the rules be checked in under a second.

Modality is the stack, not a flag. MenuScene sits at the bottom of a SceneStack; choosing a mode pushes a GameScene on top, and Esc pops back. Nothing anywhere holds an in_menu boolean — a game that has been popped stops receiving frames because the stack does not call it, which is the rule the engine's scene.py exists to enforce.

The mode menu is the engine's own texastoast.ui.Menu, given layout metrics in cells instead of its pixel defaults. Navigation, selection and the callbacks are the widget's; only the numbers and the palette are the game's.

The rules came from wii/, not web/

wii/source/board.c is the version of these rules already separated from its renderer, and it was checked against the web game's own assertions when it was written. web/js/game.js has the same rules tangled through ~25 document.* call sites and a constructor that caches DOM nodes, so porting from it would have meant extracting the logic first.

tests/test_board.py is wii/tests/test_board.c's assertion table, ported. All three builds have to agree on every one of these or the same game plays differently in three places, and that divergence is invisible until a player notices.

The gold personal-best tile, and how it differs from web/

The tile holding the best value ever built by merging is plated gold, and it shimmers — the web sweeps a gradient across it every 2.5s, and a cell that can only be one colour at a time does the same sweep by changing colour. Only the bright half of the web's gradient is used: its dark stops are corner shading that is never the whole tile there, and here they would be, which both makes the number hard to read and leaves the best tile on the board looking duller than a lesser one beside it. tests/test_app.py pins both as ratios.

Which tile gets it is asked of the value — Board.is_personal_best — the way wii/source/render.c asks it, rather than tracked as a parallel board of booleans that slides and merges alongside the values the way web/js/game.js does. So the web golds whichever tile reached the value first, and this golds every tile holding it. Cosmetic: the height bonus is the same in all three.

Asking about the value cannot accidentally gild a spawned tile, which is the case the web's implementation is careful about. tests/test_board.py checks it exhaustively rather than by argument: every value every spawn table can hand out, at every width, against that width's height floor.

The rainbow tile — the tile that earned a Gauntlet promotion — is in all three, and takes precedence over the gold when one tile is both.

Not ported

board_move() on the Wii also fills in a TileMove list recording where every tile came from, so the renderer can slide tiles instead of teleporting them. It is written but never read by the rules, and a terminal redrawing a 4x4 grid does not animate, so it is omitted. Omitting it cannot change behaviour.