Game-RoyalUr

The Royal Game of Ur: a race for two players on a board of twenty squares,
about 4,600 years old. Each side has seven pieces, throws a handful of
two-sided dice, and moves one piece that many squares along a route that
crosses the other side's.

This distribution is the game, an opponent for it, and a program to play it
in a terminal.

    use Game::RoyalUr;

    my $game = Game::RoyalUr->new(seed => 'any bytes at all');
    until ($game->is_over) {
        my @moves = $game->legal;
        $game->play($moves[0]);
    }
    print $game->result->winner, " wins\n";

Or, from a shell:

    royalur
    royalur --rules masters --level 2

The rules of the game are lost and every set is a modern reconstruction. Two
are played here by name: finkel, proposed by Irving Finkel of the British
Museum, and masters, proposed by James Masters.

Every throw of the dice follows from a seed, so a game can be recorded and
played again exactly. The engine is C, with no floating point in it; the
opponent looks ahead through the dice and is bounded by the number of
positions it may look at, never by the clock, so it makes the same move on
every machine.


INSTALLATION

A C compiler is needed. To install this module, run the following commands:

	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make test
	make install

It requires Object::Proto::Sugar. Term::ReadKey is recommended: with it the
terminal program is played with the arrow keys, and without it by typing.


SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION

After installing, you can find documentation for this module with the
perldoc command.

    perldoc Game::RoyalUr
    perldoc royalur

You can also look for information at:

    RT, CPAN's request tracker (report bugs here)
        https://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=Game-RoyalUr

    Search CPAN
        https://metacpan.org/release/Game-RoyalUr


LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

This software is Copyright (c) 2026 by LNATION <email@lnation.org>.

This is free software, licensed under:

  The Artistic License 2.0 (GPL Compatible)