/oop-boggle

Primary LanguagePython

Boggle Challenge Part 1: Basic Board Generation

Summary

The goal of this exercise is to create a 4x4 grid of randomly generated letters, according to the rules of Boggle. If you're not familiar with boggle, you can read more on wikipedia.

Step 1: Basic Boggle Board

The BoggleBoard class has one core instance method: shake!

  1. shake! should modify the board by filling each cell with a random upper-case letter A..Z. Also, there aren't any restrictions on the letters. They can appear multiple times, so choose at random.

  2. If you've looked into Boggle, you're probably thinking about how in Boggle 'Q' is always 'Qu'. Don't worry about this, instead just use 'Q' to represent 'Qu'

Example

Our code should output something like this:

  • When a new 'BoggleBoard' is initialized the output should look like this:
   ____
   ____
   ____
   ____
  • When shake! is invoked on our board, it should output something like this:
   LMVQ
   DKHZ
   SUCO
   GDMV
  • When I shake! it again, it should randomly generate the board again.

Step 2: Smart Boggle board

We currently implement our board without modeling dice. We should do that next to make our board come closer to modeling a real Boggle board. Instead of choosing 16 random letters from the entire alphabet, we should choose a random letter from any of the six letters on the die, for each of the 16 dice that boggle uses. We also need to choose a random order for the dice themselves.

We're still only going to have one core method, shake! on our BoggleBoard class. The following is a list of Boggle Dice, with 'Q' representing 'Qu':

AAEEGN
ELRTTY
AOOTTW
ABBJOO
EHRTVW
CIMOTU
DISTTY
EIOSST
DELRVY
ACHOPS
HIMNQU
EEINSU
EEGHNW
AFFKPS
HLNNRZ
DEILRX

Step 3: Dealing with that Pesky 'Qu'

Our Boggle board generator is nearly finished! We still have one pesky little issue with the representation of 'Qu'. Our board currently prints a 'Q' instead of a 'Qu'. How could we print a 'Qu' instead?

There are various ways to approach this, but it might be worth keeping in mind that how the board is represented in your program, doesn't have to be how it appears to a person using the program.

The alignment of your board my start to look funky once you figure this out, so you'll want to make sure you adjust your program so that it now looks something like this:

P  N  O  T
S  A  F  G
S  V  L  T
L  Qu Z  F

Additional Resources