Bunco—a dice game that makes Yahtzee look complicated!

HOW-TOs, Programming, Shell Scripting

I haven't dug into any game programming for a while, so I thought it was high time to do something in that realm. At first, I thought "Halo as a shell script?", but then I came to my senses. Instead, let's look at a simple dice game called Bunco. You may not have heard of it, but I bet your Mom has—it's a quite popular game for groups of gals at a local pub or tavern.

Played in six rounds with three dice, the game is simple. You roll all three dice and have to match the current round number. If all three dice match the current round number (for example, three 3s in round three), you score 21. If all three match but aren't the current round number, it's a Mini Bunco and worth five points. Failing both of those, each die with the same value as the round number is worth one point.

Played properly, the game also involves teams, multiple tables including a winner's table, and usually cash prizes funded by everyone paying $5 or similar to play and based on specific winning scenarios like "most Buncos" or "most points". I'll skip that part here, however, and just focus on the dice part.

Let's Do the Math

Before I go too far into the programming side of things, let me talk briefly about the math behind the game. Dice are easy to work with because on a properly weighted die, the chance of a particular value coming up is 1:6.

Random tip: not sure whether your dice are balanced? Toss them in salty water and spin them. There are some really interesting YouTube videos from the D&D world showing how to do this test.

So what are the odds of three dice having the same value? The first die has a 100% chance of having a value (no leaners here), so that's easy. The second die has a 16.66% chance of being any particular value, and then the third die has the same chance of being that value, but of course, they multiply, so three dice have about a 2.7% chance of all having the same value.

Then, it's a 16.66% chance that those three dice would be the current round's number—or, in mathematical terms: 0.166 * 0.166 * 0.166 = 0.00462.

In other words, you have a 0.46% chance of rolling a Bunco, which is a bit less than once out of every 200 rolls of three dice.

It could be tougher though. If you were playing with five dice, the chance of rolling a Mini Bunco (or Yahtzee) is 0.077%, and if you were trying to accomplish a specific value, say just sixes, then it's 0.00012% likely on any given roll—which is to say, not bloody likely!

And So into the Coding

As with every game, the hardest part is really having a good random number generator that generates truly random values. That's actually hard to affect in a shell script though, so I'm going to sidestep this entire issue and assume that the shell's built-in random number generator will be sufficient.

What's nice is that it's super easy to work with. Just reference $RANDOM, and you'll have a random value between 0 and MAXINT (32767):

$ echo $RANDOM $RANDOM $RANDOM
10252 22142 14863

To constrain that to values between 1–6 use the modulus function:

$ echo $(( $RANDOM % 6 ))
3
$ echo $(( $RANDOM % 6 ))
0

Oops! I forgot to shift it one. Here's another try:

$ echo $(( ( $RANDOM % 6 ) + 1 ))
6

That's the dice-rolling feature. Let's make it a function where you can specify the variable you'd like to have the generated value as part of the invocation:

rolldie()
{
   local result=$1
   rolled=$(( ( $RANDOM % 6 ) + 1 ))
   eval $result=$rolled
}

The use of the eval is to ensure that the variable specified in the invocation is actually assigned the calculated value. It's easy to work with:

rolldie die1

That will load a random value between 1–6 into the variable die1. To roll your three dice, it's straightforward:

rolldie die1 ; rolldie die2 ; rolldie die3

Now to test the values. First, let's test for a Bunco where all three dice have the same value, and it's the value of the current round too:

if [ $die1 -eq $die2 ] && [ $die2 -eq $die3 ] ; then
  if [ $die1 -eq $round ] ; then
    echo "BUNCO!"
    score=25
  else
    echo "Mini Bunco!"
    score=5
  fi

That's probably the hardest of the tests, and notice the unusual use of test in the first conditional: [ cond1 ] && [ cond2 ]. If you're thinking that you could also write it as cond1 -a cond2, you're right. As with so much in the shell, there's more than one way to get to the solution.

The remainder of the code is straightforward; you just need to test for whether the die matches the current round value:

if [ $die1 -eq $round ] ; then
  score=1
fi
if [ $die2 -eq $round ] ; then
  score=$(( $score + 1 ))
fi
if [ $die3 -eq $round ] ; then
  score=$(( $score + 1 ))
fi

The only thing to consider here is that you don't want to score die value vs. round if you've also scored a Bunco or Mini Bunco, so the entire second set of tests needs to be within the else clause of the first conditional (to see if all three dice have the same value).

Put it together and specify the round number on the command line, and here's what you have at this point:

$ sh bunco.sh 5
You rolled: 1 1 5
score = 1
$ sh bunco.sh 2
You rolled: 6 4 3
score = 0
$ sh bunco.sh 1
You rolled: 1 1 1
BUNCO!
score = 25

A Bunco so quickly? Well, as I said, there might be a slight issue with the randomness of the random number generator in the shell.

You can test it once you have the script working by running it a few hundred times and then checking to see what percentage are Bunco or Mini Bunco, but I'll leave that as an exercise for you, dear reader. Well, maybe I'll come back to it another time.

Let's finish up this script by having it accumulate score and run for all six rounds instead of specifying a round on the command line. That's easily done, because it's just a wrapper around the entire script, or, better, the big conditional statement becomes a function all its own:

BuncoRound()
{
   # roll, display, and score a round of bunco!
   # round is specified when invoked, score added to totalscore

   local score=0 ; local round=$1 ; local hidescore=0

   rolldie die1 ; rolldie die2 ; rolldie die3
   echo Round $round. You rolled: $die1 $die2 $die3

   if [ $die1 -eq $die2 ] && [ $die2 -eq $die3 ] ; then
     if [ $die1 -eq $round ] ; then
       echo "  BUNCO!"
       score=25
       hidescore=1
     else
       echo "  Mini Bunco!"
       score=5
       hidescore=1
     fi
   else
     if [ $die1 -eq $round ] ; then
       score=1
     fi
     if [ $die2 -eq $round ] ; then
       score=$(( $score + 1 ))
     fi
     if [ $die3 -eq $round ] ; then
       score=$(( $score + 1 ))
     fi
   fi

   if [ $hidescore -eq 0 ] ; then
     echo "  score this round: $score"
   fi

   totalscore=$(( $totalscore + $score ))
}

I admit, I couldn't resist a few improvements as I went along, including the addition of it showing either Bunco, Mini Bunco or a score value (that's what $hidescore does).

Invoking it is a breeze, and you'll use a for loop:

for round in {1..6} ; do
  BuncoRound $round
done

That's about the entire program at this point. Let's run it once and see what happens:

$ sh bunco.sh 1
Round 1. You rolled: 2 3 3
  score this round: 0
Round 2. You rolled: 2 6 6
  score this round: 1
Round 3. You rolled: 1 2 4
  score this round: 0
Round 4. You rolled: 2 1 4
  score this round: 1
Round 5. You rolled: 5 5 6
  score this round: 2
Round 6. You rolled: 2 1 3
  score this round: 0
Game over. Your total score was 4

Ugh. Not too impressive, but it's probably a typical round. Again, you can run it a few hundred—or thousand—times, just save the "Game over" line, then do some quick statistical analysis to see how often you score more than 3 points in six rounds. (With three dice to roll a given value, you should hit that 50% of the time.)

It's not a complicated game by any means, but it makes for an interesting little programming project. Now, what if they used 20-sided die and let you re-roll one die per round and had a dozen rounds?