Conclusion

This exercise proved that a couple of hundreds lines of Mathematica code are enough to completely implement three playable prototypes of board games together with the corresponding basic graphical user interface, plus an attractive Java Swing version of one of them. With the design pattern presented, we demonstrated that most of this code will be reusable with minor changes for implementing other board games.

As playing is one of the oldest human activities, trying to understand how the games work and why some of them are so addictive could be a recreational and exciting challenge. The library of applications that we created could be extended to different games. Many strategies could be implemented and tested, even on our three examples, to better understand and enjoy them.