Game-Senet

Senet, the race game of ancient Egypt: thirty houses in three rows of ten,
five pieces a side, and four throwing sticks. Both sides run the same S-shaped
track from house 1 to house 30 and off the board, and the first to bear every
piece off wins. A piece that lands on one of the other side's swaps houses
with it, unless that piece is protected by its neighbours.

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

    use Game::Senet;

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

Or, from a shell:

    senet
    senet --rules skyruk --level 2

Nobody knows how Senet was played, and every set of rules is a modern
reconstruction. Two are played here by name: kendall, after Timothy Kendall's
reconstruction (1978) as modern sets play it, and skyruk, a reconstruction
published with an open-source implementation.

Every throw of the sticks 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 sticks 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 and Game::Terminal::Kit. 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::Senet
    perldoc senet

You can also look for information at:

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

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


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)