French Tarot (terminal)

Four-player French Tarot against three computers, in a terminal. It is the second version of the game, beside web/. It runs on the magmacrunch engine's terminal backend, either as a cabinet in the magmacrunch arcade or as its own command, and plays the same either way.

pipx install magmacrunch-tarot
tarot              # the title
tarot --play       # straight into a game
tarot --seed 7     # the same deals every time

For working on it, from this folder:

pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m tarot

Keys

You sit south, with West, North and East round the table. Cards are written R♥, 10♠, 21 for a trump and Ex for the Excuse, and your hand is sorted as on the page: trumps, the Excuse, then the suits. Only the cards you may play are lit. The computers bid after half a second and play after 0.6, a finished trick stays on the table for a second, and a hand nobody takes is redealt after 1.5, all as on the page. At the end of each hand the result is shown: the taker's oudlers and points against the threshold, and everyone's running total. When you were the taker and your total makes the table, you are asked for initials, which is when the page saves a score too.

Needs a 76x24 terminal.

It is the browser's game, and the browser's opponents

tarot/rules.py is web/js/config.js, tarot-deck.js, trick-logic.js, scoring.js, ai.js and game.js, ported function for function, including the order the computers look through their hands in, because that is how they break ties. Two tests hold the port to the page:

• tests/test_oracle.py. tools/js_oracle.mjs loads those files unmodified, with a seeded Math.random, and plays 30 games of five hands through TarotGame's own API in main.js's order: 150 hands and about 12,000 moves. In odd games your seat plays at random; in even games it bids what scoring.js suggests and plays the page's own computer moves. Between them they cover 175 redeals, 83 hands you took, 23 Garde Sans, 14 Garde Contre and 148 Excuses. The test replays every move through the port and requires the same state after each: phase, dealer, bidder, player, taker, bids, every hand, the dog, the trick, every trick pile, the scores and the poignée. Each hand's result must match too, line by line.
• tests/test_rules.py. It sets up by hand the cases worth pinning, including the page's own rules below, so that fixing one shows as a change.

The page's rules

These are the page's own, kept because the oracle requires them. Each is a place where the page is not French Tarot:

• After a redeal, the first bid ends the auction. deal() does not clear the count of bids placed, so it is still 4. Whoever bids first after a hand nobody took is the only one who bids, Passe included: a Passe there is a second redeal.
• Petit au bout is never paid. The round's score looks for the last trick in the history under a type that is never written, so the bonus is always off. In 400 played hands the Petit fell in the last trick 44 times and was paid none of them.
• The Excuse is lost to the trick. It goes into the winner's pile, and its player is still owed a low card from the winner, even when the two are on the same side. In French Tarot the Excuse goes back to its player's side, who give a half-point card for it.
• Garde Contre puts the dog in every defender's pile. It is the same six cards three times. The score counts only the taker's pile, so it changes nothing that shows.
• Chelem is not played. config.js defines the bonuses, and nothing uses them.

The page used to stop when your bid closed the auction. main.js ignored what your bid returned and asked the computers to bid again, which they couldn't, for ever. It happened whenever you bid last: every fourth hand, and after a redeal or a Garde Contre too. Now main.js hands your bid's result to handleBidResult, as it does a computer's, and the game goes on to the dog or the play. Here the game always went on; test_app.py bids last and bids Garde Contre by keys and checks it does. On the page, headless Chromium bid Garde Contre in three deals: before the fix the computers tried six more bids, all refused, and the table sat at "You bid: Garde Contre"; after it, "Your turn — play a card".

The computers take on hands they can't make. In the oracle's 150 hands, a computer taker made 6 contracts of 67, with 28 points on average against about 49 needed. They bid on weak hands, and when leading they take their "highest" card from the hand in dealt order rather than sorted.

Licence

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0, as for the rest of this repository. See LICENSE and NOTICE.