Chapter 27:Creating Two Card Programs

In Chapter 16, Creating and Using More Complex Structures, we modeled a set of cards as complex structures and implemented some basic actions done with cards. The actions were implemented as functions that operated upon the complex structures. That chapter ended with a program that dealt out fours from the deck of cards and printed the result. This would have been the beginning of a complete card game, say whist, gin, or even bridge. However, far more game logic would be required and many complex problems would need to be solved (one such problem might be playing such a game over a network with each player on their own computer) to make a complete application.

Since we are learning C and are not game programmers per se, we stopped short of developing any such card games. Instead, we’ve reused the dealer.c program to expand our knowledge of C features, such as working with multiple files in Chapter 24, Working with Multi-File Programs...

Technical requirements

Continue to use the tools you chose in the Technical requirements section of Chapter 1, Running Hello, World!.

The source code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-C-Programming-Second-Edition/tree/main/Chapter27.

Game one – Blackjack

This is the first of two games we will implement using our library of structures and functions from dealer.c. We will have a complete and playable Blackjack card game between the dealer and one player.

Introducing Blackjack

Blackjack is a casino card game played between the dealer and one or more players. It is also known as 21. In our implementation, there will only be the dealer and you, the player. Blackjack uses all 52 cards from 1 to 8 decks. In our implementation, there will be only one deck. The deck is shuffled and each player is given two initial cards, as is the dealer. One of the dealer’s dealt cards is kept hidden until it is the dealer’s turn to play. In our implementation, all cards will be visible.

The face value of each hand is calculated. Each card’s face value is its number. Jack, queen, and king count as 10. Aces count as either 1 or 11. In our implementation, aces will always count as 11.

The...

Game two – One-Handed Solitaire

This is the second of two games we will implement using our pre-built collection of structures and functions from dealer.c. We will have a complete and playable One-Handed Solitaire card game that's playable by a single player.

When people used to kill time by playing cards with an actual deck of cards, they would often play one form of solitaire or another. After playing for a while, they would find that the deck was not always adequately shuffled, especially after a game progressed fairly far and there were definite patterns in the unshuffled cards. So, another type of solitaire game would be played to mix up the deck sufficiently so that the deck could again be effectively shuffled. One-Handed Solitaire is one of those games. I must admit that it is not a particularly challenging or complex game.

For our book’s purposes, it is a fairly easy game to implement, which we will do using dealer.c structures and functions.

Introducing...

Summary

This final chapter is the culmination of the various aspects of C programs we’ve developed throughout this book. We started by modifying and extending dealer.c to implement a simple but complete game of Blackjack. In doing so, we introduced various considerations when reusing pre-existing source code and using pre-existing libraries – source code intentionally built to be reused.

We finished by implementing a second game, very similar structurally to Blackjack, called One-Handed Solitaire. In this implementation, we not only built upon and extended dealer.c (via what we’d done with Blackjack); we also demonstrated how to incorporate some library code we unknowingly built earlier, a rudimentary linked list library. Note that when we employed this library, we also verified it with test code to exercise all of its functions. In this manner, we could rely on the library with confidence.

The development of both of these games provides a rather thorough...