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Asked: 2026-05-17T20:41:26+00:00

Let’s say I’m implementing my own version of Scrabble. I currently have a Board

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Let’s say I’m implementing my own version of Scrabble.
I currently have a Board class that contains lots of Squares. A Square in turn is composed of a IBonus and a Piece. The bonus implementations are actually the usual bonus for Scrabble, but it is possible that I might try to add some new and twisted bonus to spice the game — flexibility here is paramount!

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After thinking for a while I came to the conclusion that for IBonus implementations to work, they’ll need to know the whole Board and also its current position(on the Board, so it knows where it is and it can check for the piece that’s in the same square as the bonus is). This strikes me as bad as basically it needs to know a whole lot of information.

So, my naive implementation would be to pass the Board as argument to IBonus.calculate() method, IBonus.calculate(Board board, Point position), that is.

Also, it seems to create a circular reference. Or am I wrong?
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I don’t particulary like this approach, so I am looking for other possible approaches. I know I can make calculate accept an interface instead of a concrete class, i.e., calculate(IBoard board) but I IMO that isn’t all that better than the first case.

I fear being too focused on my current implementation to be able to think of whole different designs that could fit at least as well as solutions to this problem.
Maybe I could re-architect the whole game and have the bonuses in other place, so it would facilitate this calculation? Maybe I am too focused on having them on the Board? I certainly hope there are other approaches to this problem out there!

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I assume Board has the visible state of the game, and there would be other objects such as Rack (one per Player,) and a DrawPile.

    “Double Score if word contains a real (non-blank) Z” – would require you pass in the Word, or the Board and the position of the word.

    “Double Score if the word is the longest on the board” requires the entire Board.

    “Double Score if the first letter of the word matches a randomly selected letter from the DrawPile” requires the DrawPile of course.

    So to me it just depends on the rules you implement. I’d be comfortable with passing Board to the IBonus score() implementation.

    edit – more thoughts.

    So a board has 17×17 squares, or whatever. I’d assign an IBonus implementation to each square of the board (there would be an implementation called PlainEmptySquare that was inert.) You’d only need to instantiate each implementation of IBonus once – it could be referenced many times. I’d probably take the low road and instantiate each one explicitly, passing in the arguments needed. If one type needs the Board, pass it in. If another needs the DrawPile, pass it in. In your implementation, you’d have perhaps 12 lines of ugliness. /shrug

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