Quackey
Quackey is a software version of the classic Perquackey
anagramming word game. It is implemented as a Bash shell script and runs under
Linux, UNIX, and OSX. The game is suitable for either solitary or competitive play.
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The Perquackey board game consists of a set of letter dice, a 3-minute
sand timer, and specially-formatted score sheets ... all packaged in
a brightly-colored tin. Although marketed as an educational game for
children, many adults consider it to be on a par with Scrabble as an
anagramming word-building game. Over the years, it has been distributed by
Hollingsworth Brothers, Lakeside Industries, and Cardinal, among others.
It is still available for purchase.
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From a set of 10 (13 in vulnerable version) letters, the player forms
anagrams, scored according to word length, and with category completion
bonuses. There is a time limit on each play. The rules are (mostly) compatible
with classic Perquackey.
Download URL
URL of the tarball.
Screenshot
Installation
The qky.sh script requires an ASCII UNIX-format word list file,
one word per line, installed in /usr/share/dict. The name of
the file must be word.list ...
A suggested list is the script author's
yawl word list package.
(Mirror
site)
To run the script, simply type: sh qky.sh
Better yet, rename the qky.sh file to qky and make it directly
executable by a chmod 755 qky and then copy it to the
/usr/local/bin
directory. After that simply typing qky in an xterm or Gnome terminal
invokes the script.
News
Version 0.2:
Now part of this package is a qkyv.sh script that implements a
vulnerable version of Quackey.
To run that script, simply type: sh qkyv.sh
... etc.
Version 0.3:
Fixed qkyv.sh for 9-letter word display.
Added qkyv2.sh,
Same as qkyv.sh but with listing of all possible 7+ letter
anagrams appended to auto-save file.
Version 0.4:
Added qbot.sh,
a "bot" that automatically plays Quackey with any arbitrary
letter set the player gives it.
History
My first contact with Perquackey was an article in a 1979 issue of
Creative Computing. David E. Powers had written the game in Level
II BASIC for the TRS-80 Model I. A few hours of typing in the listing
and pressing <RUN/ENTER> gave me a black-and-white screen full of word
columns that I anagrammed from a randomly generated letter set and
the resultant scores. The program checked whether the input words were
constructable and scored them accordingly. It was up to me, the player,
to validate the words by looking them up in a paper dictionary.
The program was good enough to make me wish that . . . it were just a
little better, perhaps with an automatic word validity check against an
in-memory dictionary. But, at the time, my coding skills weren't quite
up to the task.
Here's a sample of Powers' original code:
2050 FOR LR=1 TO LP+3
2060 T$=MID$(W$(LP,LQ),LR,1)
2070 IN=INSTR(LX$,T$)
2080 IF IN=0 THEN 2110
2090 MID$(LX$,IN,1)=" "
2100 GOTO 2130
2110 F(LP,LQ)=1
2120 ON LP+1 GOSUB 3840, 3860, 3880, 3900, 3920, 3940, 3960
2230 NEXT LR
Whew! Makes you glad you have the option to code in Bash.
While Powers' program in a sense "inspired" me, I most
certainly didn't port, translate, or even have it at hand when I wrote
qky.sh. BASIC spaghetti code is pretty much useless as a template. Better
to start fresh.
Compare the above snippet with an excerpt from qky.sh that, I suppose,
accomplishes pretty much the same thing.
while [ "$idx" -lt "$strlen" ]
do
is_found=$(expr index "${local_LS[*]}" "${local_word:idx:1}")
if [ "$is_found" -eq "$NONCONS" ] # Not constructable!
then
echo "$FAILURE"; return
else
((pos = ($is_found - 1) / 2)) # Compensate for spaces betw. letters!
local_LS[pos]=$NULL # Zero out used letters.
((idx++)) # Bump index.
fi
done
While I can't claim to be anything resembling a virtuoso scripter,
I'd say my code is somewhat of an improvement on the original. On the
other hand, Mr. Powers has likely improved his own coding skills over
the past three decades and could possibly run rings around me now. . . .