Deck

"Deck" is one of the most useful component on PHP side. With "Deck", you can manage cards of your game on server side.

Using "deck", you will be able to use the following features without writing a single SQL database request:

• Place cards in pile, shuffle cards, draw cards one by one or many by many.
• "Auto-reshuffle" discard pile into deck when deck is empty.
• Move cards between different locations: hands of players, the table, ...

Using Deck: Hearts example

Deck component is massively used in "Hearts" example game - a card game. You can find in "hearts.game.php" that the object "$this->cards" is used many times.

Deck overview

With Deck component, you manage all cards of your game.

Using Deck component, each card will have 5 properties:

• id: This is the unique ID of each card. Two cards can't get the same ID. IDs are generated automatically by the Deck component when you create cards during the Setup phase of your game.
• type and type_arg: These two values defines the type of your card. type is a short string, and type_arg is an integer. You can use these two values as you want to make sure you will be able to identify the different cards of the game.

Examples of usage of "type" and "type_arg":

• In "Hearts", "type" is the color of the card (1 to 4) and "type_arg" is the value of the card (1, 2, ... 10, J, Q, K).
• In "Seasons", "type" is the type of the card (ex: 1 is Amulet of Air, 2 is Amulet of Fire, etc...). type_arg is not used.
• In "Takenoko", a Deck component is used for objective cards. "type" is the kind of objective (irrigation/panda/plot) and "type_arg" is the ID of the specific objective to realize (ex: "a green bamboo x4"). Note that a second Deck component is used in Takenoko to manage the "garden plot" pile.

For each Deck component in your game, you need to create a dedicated table in database. This table has a standard format. In practical, if you want to have a Deck component named "card", you just have to copy/paste the following in your "dbmodel.sql":

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `card` (
  `card_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `card_type` varchar(16) NOT NULL,
  `card_type_arg` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `card_location` varchar(16) NOT NULL,
  `card_location_arg` int(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`card_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

Once you did this (and restart your game), you can declare your Deck component in your PHP code in your class constructor. For Hearts for example, I added to "Hearts()" method:

        $this->cards = self::getNew( "module.common.deck" );
        $this->cards->init( "card" );

Note that we specify "card" here, the name of our previously created table. It means you can create several "Deck" with several tables. Most of the time this is unuseful: a Deck component should manage all objects of the same kind (ex: all cards of the game).

Afterwards, we can start using our "Deck" object. In general, the first