[pbmserv-dev] Scramble -tournament

[John Williams <williams@tni.com>]

I've been thinking that a scramble variant with challenges might be fun,
so this is what I have come up with:

scramble challenge -tournament player1 player2

-tournament is an alternative to -strict or -nostrict, so it shows
(English/Tournament) under the board.

Under the -tournament option, you are not told whether your words are in
the dictionary or not.  (Strict returns an error, NoStrict allows the
word but tells you about it.)

You can send "challenge" as your move.  The server will check the words
from your opponent's previous move.  If all of them are in the dictionary,
you score nothing, and your turn is over.  If any of them are not in the
dictionary, it takes back his words and his score, and puts his letters
back in his tray, and you get to move again.

According to official tournament rules, the judge does not tell the
players which words are bad, so I am currently just printing "Challenge
successful" without showing which word(s) were bad.  But I could be
persuaded to change that.

Because the tiles _might_ get put back into the players hand if a
successful challenge occurs, the -tournament mode delays drawing new tiles
until after your opponent moves.  In real scrabble, players have a limited
amount of time to voice their intent to challenge.  So to order to avoid
the need to send a "no challenge" command after every move, I decided to
do it this way.  One cannot plan one's move during the opponent's time,
but with the long email time limits, I hope that is not too much of a
hardship.

I have also limited -tournament mode to 2 players, so I don't have to deal
with third person challenges.

Any comments or suggestions before I install it on the server?

~ John Williams