Bablyon

Babylon is a game played by stacking tiles. It's a small, simple game, amenable to tackling in an evening session.

We'd discussed this in the Haskell group prior to using it as a Code Retreat problem, so a few of us had been thinking about how to solve it already. We may have also talked about it at the Clojure group. For awhile Leo had been bringing it with him everywhere so we used it in all the various meetups we attend.

Some example code was posted in the comments section: https://github.com/HaskellTO/projects/blob/master/babylon/Babylon.hs

That was an attempt to solve the game and determine which player had the advantage (it appears to be player two, in the standard game, but we're still not sure). The Code Retreat challenge was to build a system that could play the game, ideally against another human, but some people decided to try generating the game tree instead.

This was a fun problem, but probably not one to be returned to multiple times. It was too hard for some groups, and also made it too easy to get lost in the details. It worked better as a group coding exercise than in the Code Retreat format, and possibly as a result we had a nice conversation / blackboard session afterward instead of doing a last session, where we talked through potential approaches and implications.