Quadri

Quadri is a two player board game similar to Connect 4. Instead of pieces having one attribute (red or black), they have 4.

Getting Started

(Coming soon - compiled binaries for your architecture!)

1. (If needed) Setup rust on your machine using rustup (detailed instructions here).
2. Clone the repo locally (forking if desired - contributions welcome).
3. In the local repo's root, run cargo build --profile release
4. In a full color terminal run ./target/release/quadri
   1. Use a terminal emulator like VS Code, iterm2, kitty, etc. Don't use mac's default terminal as it doesn't support full color and won't render piece background colors.
5. Have fun!

Rules

Setup

Quadri has 16 pieces, each with one of two values for 4 total attributes.

In the CLI version these attributes are:

• Red or Blue
• Rectangle or Circle
• Hollow or Full
• Yellow background or White background

All the pieces are shown below:

The quadri board is a 4 x 4 grid which starts empty.

Objective

You win if you are the person to PLACE the final piece that generates a quadri. A quadri is four pieces in appropriate spots that share at least one attribute in common. (4 red pieces can form a quadri or 4 blue pieces, 4 rectangles, 4 yellow background...)

Quadris can occur on:

• Horizontals

  

• Verticals

  

• Diagonals

  

• Square Corners - including small, medium, and large squares

  

Play

1. Player 1 picks a piece for Player 2 to place.
2. Player 2 places that piece.
3. Player 2 then picks a piece for player 1 to place.
4. Player 1 places that piece.
5. Repeat until someone places a piece which makes a quadri!

Contributing

Pull requests welcome.

Gentle and tactful rust education is also welcome!

Motivation

One freezing day in Montreal, my wife and I went to a board game cafe and asked the game sommelier if we could play Set while we had some drinks and dinner. The game sommelier didn't know of set, but after our description he brought us Quarto, which I instantly loved. It appealed to my math loving side - I wanted to know if draws were possible, how frequently they were possible, and what isomorphisms existed due to board symmetry and mapping across pieces. For months- on and off- I thought about it (though I didn't actually "do" any math).

While on FMLA Leave from work to care for a sick family member, I took my miniscule amount of free time to build my own version of Quarto. I wanted to practice rust (which I've been learning off an on), build a tool that I could use to answer some of my combinatorial questions (who wants to read textbooks, do real math, and use paper?!?), and provide something where I could "accomplish a project" while living in random hotels and hanging out in hospitals.

Currently (2023/01), the game only supports a two-player local version. I'm hoping to first answers some of my math questions, then build a GUI using svelte and WASM (two other technologies that I'm interested in learning), then allow for more customizablity of games (what defines a "quadri"), then build an AI. In the unlikely event I actually do all of that, perhaps I'll support two player remote play or try to package it into a mobile app.

Mathematically, I'm also interested in the generalization of this style of game - can you make a different shaped board that fills completely with pieces using 5 attributes or 3 attributes? What about pairs of attributes? What about 3 dimensions?