A Gameplay Tutorial in Three Turns

To help you get a feel for the strategy and flow of gameplay in Ruby Racko, let's go through a few turns of a game together.

The Setup

We've configured this particular game to have one human player and one computer player.

Our human player is named "Harry".

The computer player has named itself "Old Max Merchant."

The cards have been shuffled.

Gameplay

Let's play!

Max Merchant's First Turn

Max Merchant gets to go first. Here is what we see during his turn:

Each card in Max's rack has been replaced with a ?? symbol. During a computer player's turn, the Game Table hides the computer's rack information.

We are allowed to know, however, that Max drew from the Draw Pile and discarded a 28.

To continue play, we enter 1 to "hide" Max's rack.

The Turn Transition Screen

Now we see the turn transition screen.

Ruby Racko asks for permission to display Harry's rack because it knows that Harry is a human player. Since human players need to share the same computer screen when they play together, this transition screen helps to keep each player's rack a secret from the others.

But right now, we are Harry.

So let's enter 1 to reveal our rack.

Our First Turn

Now we see our unsorted rack of cards.

Look at all those low cards on the j end of our rack! That's where we need to place our highest cards. What a mess.

The top card on the Discard Pile is 28, which doesn't seem very helpful right now. Let's draw a new card from the Draw Pile by entering 1.

We drew a 10.

Since this is a pretty low card, let's use it to replace the 51 at position b by typing b into the terminal and pressing enter.

Ruby Racko gives us a chance to check our work before moving on to the next player.

Let's enter 1 to confirm that we want to discard that 51 and complete our turn.

Max's Second Turn

This time Max discarded a 30.

Our Second Turn

Since Max's old 30 wouldn't have helped us very much, we drew from the Draw Pile. And it's a good thing we did - we got a 6! The 6 fits perfectly in position a in front of our 10.

We can now enter 1 to save and end our turn.

Max's Third Turn

Now Max has discarded a 39.

Our Third Turn - What Would You Do?

At the beginning of our third turn, we have a 39 at the top of the Discard Pile. We could draw this card and use to to replace the 24 at position e.

If we do that, then we would need to find a card between 10 and 36 to put at position c. This shouldn't be too hard since a fifteen-card range is generous for one rack position.

But if we use the 39 we would need to draw four cards higher than 41 to fit at positions g,h,i and j. This means that we would have a range of only nineteen cards to use across four positions.

And considering that we have already discarded a couple of high cards - and that Max has ten mystery cards in his own rack - we have to ask ourselves: exactly how many high cards could we possibly find before Max sorts his rack?

What would you do?

This crossroads marks the end of the Gameplay Tutorial. What would you do if you were Harry?

Would you accept the 39 from the Discard Pile and commit to spending the rest of the game looking for four cards higher than 41?

Or would you try to replace the 03 and 36 at positions c and d with cards smaller than 24? This would allow you to replace the last five cards in our rack with cards that are higher than 24.

How You Play is Up to You!

With Ruby Racko, how you play the odds is entirely up to you!

Are You Ready to Play for Real?

Mac users can download and play Ruby Racko by following these instructions.

GitHub users with a Ruby development environment can follow these instructions to start playing today!

Tutorial