Core concepts

These are some of the basic core concepts of Boardzilla that will be referred to throughout the documentation.

Game

The Game is the main class that defines the behaviour of the the game and it's layout. The first order of business when creating a game is to subclass Game so you can add your own methods. The Game class includes all the Spaces and Pieces of the board. Together these are called Elements. The Game is itself a Space but with special behaviour.

Space

Spaces are regions or zones of the Board. They are fixed and never change once the game starts. A Space can also contain other Spaces and Pieces.

Piece

Pieces are movable objects in the game. They can move from Space to Space and can also be moved inside other Pieces, such as for instance, when tokens are placed onto a card.

Pile

The Pile is a holding area for pieces that are not in use. Pieces can be moved into and out of the Pile. It is never visible. Think of it as the box sitting off to the side of the game.

You can read further about this in Board Structure.

Player

The player is a class that represents a user playing the game. Each game will have a player class specific to it. Players can have pieces and spaces assigned to them, and any piece that enters these becomes "owned" by the player.

You can read further about this in Players.

Action

An Action is a discrete unit of choice for a player. An action has a name, any possible selections for the action, and behavior. In Chess, for example, an action might be called "move". It has two selections: the piece being moved, and space it's moved to. Its behavior would be to move the piece to its destination and a message to the game log.

You can read further about this in Actions.

Flow

The Flow of your game is how the game runs from beginning to end. This describes the phases, rounds and turns of the game, and what actions are available to players at which point in the Flow.

You can read further about this in Flow.