Question

I am trying to develop an UNO card game, and now I reach to a point where I need a data structure that can hold the whole deck, and then I can take pieces of it and distribute it among several places (The players, the discard pile, and the draw pile). The code would be something like this:

public class UnoGame
{
    public UnoGame()
    {
        SomeDataStructure<Card> unoDeck = generateUnoCards();
        List<Cards> player1 = unoDeck.get(7);
        List<Cards> player2 = unoDeck.get(7);
        List<Cards> discardPile = unoDeck.get(1);
        List<Cards> drawPile = unoDeck.getRest();
    }

    private static SomeDataStructure<Card> generateUnoCards()
    {
        SomeDataStructure<Card> cards = new SomeDataStructure<Card>(108);
        // Here we can create the proper cards and add them to the data structre
        Collections.shuffle(cards);
        return cards;
    }
}

So, it there any built-in data structure in Java that fits my requirements? Or should I implement my own data structure?

Answer 1

It’s not really clear why you need anything special. I would model it as per the real game: a stack for all the cards (using LinkedList<T> as the stack implementation), which you then take cards off to get a hand, and which is also used to fetch cards later. I would model each player with a separate class though… even if initially it just contains a List<Card> or something similar.

List<Player> players = new ArrayList<Player>();
LinkedList<Card> deck = createDeck(); // This should shuffle too
for (int i = 0; i < playerCount; i++) {
    Player player = new Player();
    players.add(player);
    for (int j = 0; j < 7; j++) {
        player.addCard(deck.removeLast());
    }
}
LinkedList<Card> discards = new LinkedList<Card>();

At every point, if you think about what would happen in the physical game, it should be reasonably easy.