kalah(1)

NAME
kalah - oriental board game

SYNOPSIS
kalah [-s portnumber] [-c hostname -p port]

DESCRIPTION
kalah is an ancient board game in which the players have to gain beans or other stuff in their master- (or winning-) cups. The other six cups are the playing cups. Please check out http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/privat/neumeist/public_html/kalah_eng.html for further information on the game.

With this imlementation of kalah you cannot play against the computer. However it is planned to implement this as a playing mode. Currently you can play against yourself (for examining a efficent winning strategy ;-} ) or you can play against a other person over the network.

To play in network mode one player has to start kalah in server mode, the other in client mode. As this is a two players game in original, only two players can connect together over the network to play this game.

As we are "computer scientists" the amount of beans is displayed simply as numbers. Maybe there is a version with animated rolling beans in the future ;-}. The XFORMS library was used to implement Kalah.

RULES
The rules of the game haven't been written down by Matthias.

OPTIONS

-s portnumber
    starts the game in network mode as a server that listens on port portnumber. In network mode your counterpart is a human player sitting on a remote host instead ot the computer. The execution of the program is freezed until a client player connects successfully. The client player will get the first move. The lower cups and the kalah to the right are always yours, regardless of playing in client or server mode.

-c hostname
    starts the game in network mode as a client. Try to connect to a already established kalah server on the remote host hostname. This works only if you give also the -p option.

-p port
    specify the portnumber to connect to a kalah server in network mode. You must have given the -c option before.

ENVIRONMENT
No environment variables are used

SEE ALSO
iosock(1), sockio(1), socket(2), forms(5)

BUGS
No spaces are allowed between the flag and the corresponding argument. Assume that the server hostname is 'grobi' and the client hostname is 'kermit'. Example: The player on 'grobi' types at first:

kalah -s34567

then the other player on 'kermit' types:

kalah -cgrobi -p34567

The -c flag must be set before the -p flag.

AUTHOR
Thomas Pantzer, pantec@aix520.informatik.uni-leipzig.de, 1998 Matthias Neumeister, neumeist@aix520.informatik.uni-leipzig.de, 1998