Dominiate

Dominiate is a Dominion simulator, in which you can program bots to follow strategies that you define and see which one wins.

It is inspired by Geronimoo's Dominion Simulator. It shares the feature that, to define many possible strategies, you may simply list cards and conditions in which to buy them in priority order.

The code is meant to be open and extensible. Many other aspects of a strategy can be overridden, including its preferences for how to play actions. If this system doesn't allow you to define the strategy you want and you're okay with writing more code, I encourage you to fork the simulator and change it so that it does.

Dominiate is written in CoffeeScript, which compiles to JavaScript. This means it can either run at the command line using node.js, or it can run natively in a Web browser!

Documentation

The docs directory contains documentation in the "literate programming" style -- that is, it shows you the code in parallel with explanations of what it does.

Installation

To use the command-line version, you will need a reasonable development environment with a command line.

First, acquire node.js (v0.4 or later) and npm (the Node Package Manager). The best way to do this differs by operating system and changes a lot.

Enable CoffeeScript by running sudo npm-g install coffee-script (or whatever the equivalent is on Windows). Now node.js will understand CoffeeScript source files.

Running "./play.coffee bot1 bot2" will load the bots with the specified names and play them against each other. For example:

./play.coffee strategies/BigMoney.coffee strategies/ChapelWitch.coffee

Building the Web app

The Web version of Dominiate is built using CoffeeScript and Less CSS. You'll need to follow the instructions above to set up CoffeeScript. You should also install Less CSS with sudo npm-g install less.

Then, type make to build the JavaScript and CSS files that will be used on the Web.

Do not edit the computer-written JavaScript directly! That way lies madness.

Roadmap

Short-term planned features include:

• Don't buy cards that make you instantly lose
• Implement almost all the cards

Longer term plans:

• Simulate the effects of playing cards (to a shallow depth) in order to choose an action.
• Calculate the game-theoretic implications of a buy, to implement the Penultimate Province Rule.
• Hook into Golem, in order to buy a card based on the situation

Things I never plan to implement without help:

• Tricks with multi-revealing Secret Chamber
• Outpost
• Possession