Consolidate game-playing bots

[showell]

We have at least three bots related to two-player games: chess, tictactoe, connectfour.

We should try to consolidate some of the code related to two-player games, so that it's easy to create future two-player games without duplicating logic for inviting players to games, managing message flow, etc., that is really the same for all two-player games, apart from small details that could be delegated to game-specific classes.

The best example we have so far in terms of high level design is the connect-four game. The connect-four game is nice, too, because it's pretty moderate in terms of programming difficulty and fun to play.

The connect-four game has two flaws that I know of:

• It seems to have a model that there's only one active game at any time.
• It plays all games privately, instead of using streams.

If you take this ticket, you'll want to discuss ideas on the "integrations" stream.

[fremiller]

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[fremiller]

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[fremiller]

• [x] Create game adapter to support multiple games
• [x] Implement new game adapter to connect_four
• [x] Write tests for game adapter
• [x] Write tests for connect four
• [ ] Create test library
• [x] Migrate tictactoe
• [ ] Write tests for tictactoe
• [ ] Migrate chess
• [ ] Migrate merels
• [ ] Create documentation
• [ ] Add more specific error messages for games
• [ ] Add private game support
• [ ] Add idle timer
• [ ] 'stick' board messages

[showell]

As I mentioned on chat, I'm eager to get some of this PR merged, and we can create a few split-out issues for some of the remaining items:

• improve tests/documentation
• migrate to other games (e.g. chess/merel)
• add advanced features

@fredfishgames If you can get this PR to a stable state, we'll merge it even if there a few loose ends, and you can create follow up issues and assign them to yourself. It would be great to try to get another dev to port your stuff either to chess/merel or a new game as a way to get some feedback on the internals.

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[amanagr]

After working on #324, I identified these issues with game_handler:

• it starts the game only one max_players is reached, it cannot support a game that takes a range of players
• it doesn't provide a feature to make the same player move twice ( merels' take move ). Although BadMoveException can be used as a hack.

[showell]

@amanagr How hard do you think it would be to make the GameHandler for multi-player games?

[amanagr]

I am working on it, will update in 2-3 days.

[neiljp]

@amanagr Did you make any progress on this?

[amanagr]

Yeah! #324 (Port Merels) and #325(Playing the game with a range of players) are already merged. Maybe I can work more on it after Summer. @showell we should update this comment.