Basic Games in Scheme

I use this little project to test algorithms and libraries, but it's marginally fun to play with some of these.

  1. Install Chez Scheme
    • Works on Mac and Linux. Might be usable in WSL on Windows?
  2. ./basicss, type ? at the prompt for interactive fun. 
    > ?
Basic_Games_in_Scheme
Version 1.1
© 2020-2025 by Mark Damon Hughes. All Rights Reserved.
https://mdhughes.tech/basicss
Commands:
acey, aceyducey     Card game of Hi/Lo.
banner W H TEXT...  Draw a banner, each char WxH sized, max 10.
bagel               Guess a 3-digit number with place hints.
bofh                BOFH Excuse Generator.
d, dice N S         Roll N number dice of S sides.
dwarfen             Explore the Stronghold of the Dwarfen Lords.
forest W H          Tiny forest, W H is screen width & height.
guess               Guess a number 1-100 with hi/lo hints.
hangman             Guess the word before you hang.
hurkle              Catch the Hurkle.
maze W H [STYLE PARAM]Maze generator. W H are size, 3-1024
    STYLE is one of (maze wild dungeon) (default maze)
    PARAM depends on style. For maze, it is chance of extra openings, 0-100 (default 0)
    For wild, it is terrain type: (generic plain cave desert forest hill marsh mountain water)
    'maze 38 11' fits nicely on screen.
name TYPE [COUNT]   Name generator, ? for list of types
roman N             Roman-Decimal converter. N may be either system.
seabattle           Sea battle.
slash W H           Simple slash maze generator. W H are size, 8+
        'slash 40 11' fits nicely on screen.
stars               Guess a number 1-100 with star hints.
starfield           Display a simple starfield.
survival            Survival in the woods.
wordsearch [FILENAME [ALPHABET]]Create a word search puzzle,
        words from filename or entered by hand.
quit                Quit.
?, help             Show this help.

  3. ./basicss wordsearch puzzle.txt 0123456789 for word search with words from puzzle.txt (one per line), and a new filler alphabet of just numbers.

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Mentions

  • All my little software tools, things that don't belong on the Software Gallery. BasicSS: Basic Games in Scheme. Bookmarklets: Little scripts to run in your…

  • My Scheme Stuff: Category: Scheme: My blog posts on Scheme. scheme-test-unit: My unit test runner for SRFI-64. Basic Games in Scheme: Classic BASIC games &…

  • The first project I write in any new language is usually a guess-the-number game, a die roller, or an RPN calculator, then I start collecting those and other toys and utilities into a single "main menu" program, and use that to drive me to develop my libraries, play with different algorithms. Occasionally it's useful, mostly it's just a pile of stuff.
    The Scheme version has a couple useful things. I was mostly thinking about old BASIC games, so it's "BasicSS" (SS being the Chez Scheme file extension, not anything more nautical or sinister).
    Basic Games in Scheme
    I wrote a fairly malevolent wordsearch generator in the process of testing some file parsing, so here's one for 20 programming languages. I can tell you that B, C, C#, and D are not in my list. I'm doubtful that anyone can find all of them, or even half.

    Hangman depends on /usr/share/dict/words, 235,886 lines on my system, which is very unfair:
    #______
    # |
    # ---
    # (o o) /
    # --- /
    # X /
    # X/
    # X
    # X
    # /
    # /
    #
    Word: TE---EN--
    Guesses: E, T, A, O, I, N, B, R, S
    YOU LOSE! You have been hung.
    The word was TEMULENCY.

    Seabattle ("you sunk my…") sucks, it just picks targets at random; teaching it some AI would help.
    Hurkle, like all the early-'70s "find a monster on a grid" games, is awful, but the map display makes it a little easier to track your shots. "The Hurkle is a Happy Beast" by Theodore Sturgeon is one of his 10% good stories, but it provides only a little context.
    Some of this I can release source for, some I probably shouldn't, so it's just a binary for now.
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