Xyaneon.Games.Cards

A .NET Standard 2.0 library for playing cards (standard and custom), draw piles and shuffling.

Usage

To use this library, you must first install the NuGet package for it, then add the following using statement at the top of each C# source file where you plan on using it:

using Xyaneon.Games.Cards;

The two most important classes in this library are Card and DrawPile<TCard>. If you are implementing your own custom card game application using this library, then your custom card class should inherit from the Card class, and you should supply that subclass type as the generic type parameter for your DrawPile<TCard> instances.

For example, you would declare your custom MyCard class as follows:

using Xyaneon.Games.Cards;

public class MyCard : Card
{
    // Your code here.
}

...and then set up a draw pile like so:

var myDrawPile = new DrawPile<MyCard>();

Note that draw piles are considered to be face-down by default. If you have a face-up pile of cards (for e.g., a discard pile), then you have to specify it in the constructor using the isFaceUp optional parameter:

var myDrawPile = new DrawPile<MyCard>(true);

After the draw pile is created, you can do several things with it, including:

// Count the number of cards in the draw pile.
int cardCount = myDrawPile.Cards.Count;

// Draw a card. An InvalidOperationException will be thrown if the pile is
// empty.
MyCard drawnCard = myDrawPile.Draw();

// Draw three cards (or at least as many as we can if there are fewer).
IEnumerable<MyCard> drawnCards = myDrawPile.DrawAtMost(3);

// Place a card on top of the draw pile.
var cardToPlaceOnTop = new MyCard();
drawPile.PlaceOnTop(cardToPlaceOnTop);

// Shuffle the draw pile using the default shuffling algorithm.
myDrawPile.Shuffle();

// Shuffle the draw pile using a custom shuffling algorithm you implemented.
ShuffleFunction<MyCard> shuffleAlgorithm = cards => {
    // ...your implementation in here.
}
myDrawPile.Shuffle(algorithm);

// Shuffle one draw pile into another.
DrawPile<MyCard> other = myObject.YourMethodToGetAnotherDrawPile();
myDrawPile.ShuffleIn(other); // other is now empty, with its contents added to myDrawPile.

For a full list of the available properties and methods, see the source code for the DrawPile<TCard> class.

Included example: standard playing cards

For an example usage of these classes, see the standard 52-card implementation provided with this library under the Xyaneon.Games.Cards.StandardPlayingCards namespace. This is also provided for your convenience if you want to implement a card game which uses the standard 52-card deck.

License

This library is free and open-source software provided under the MIT license. Please see the LICENSE.txt file for details.