serdolli/culaska

Culaska is a fan made digital version of Kulami, a board game where players compete for control of territory on a grid. It is not officially connected to or endorsed by the company that makes the original physical game. You can play it right in a browser through itch.io, or run it as a desktop app on your own computer. The game lets you play against a friend on the same device, or against a built in AI opponent with three difficulty levels. The strongest setting uses a search based engine similar in spirit to chess engines, and according to the README no human has beaten it yet. After a game, there is a full move by move analysis screen, again modeled after chess tools like Stockfish or Lichess, that shows the best candidate moves at each point in the match. The game also includes an interactive tutorial, a board editor that lets you create and share custom boards using a short text code, and support for English, Turkish, and German. Under the hood, the AI uses a search technique called minimax with alpha beta pruning, plus a transposition table to avoid repeating work and a time budget system that spends more thinking time in the middle and end of a game than at the start. Both the AI's move search and the post game analysis are written using Python generators, which lets the calculations pause and resume in small pieces every frame instead of running on a background thread, since browsers running the WebAssembly build of the game cannot use real threads. The project is written in Python, uses the pygame library for the desktop version, and is compiled to run in browsers using a tool called pygbag. Sound effects are credited to freesound.org. The source code license is currently all rights reserved, though the author notes this may change later.