phenny games is a set of word games for the phenny irc bot. Many of them use wikipedia or wiktionary as sources of knowledge.

  • bank requires you to find the longest word you can create within a letter bank. I.e. a number of letters, which you may order and repeat at will. YAWL
  • bend requires you to find a word beginning with a given tuple of letters and ending with another given tuple. YAWL
  • defind requires players to submit definitions, and select the official one among their players guesses. WIKTIONARY
  • dict is an update to the default phenny dictionary, querying four common English dictionaries and displaying only the results.
  • history requires players to bring historical dates into the correct order. The data base are events listed on wikiedia year pages from 500 BC to 2008. WIKIPEDIA
  • jumble is a devilish anagram quiz. YAWL
  • roulette is an implementation of russian roulette using an arbitrary number of chambers and bullets. Just in case that the other games frustrate you.
  • taboo is a word guessing game where certain taboo words may not be used as a clue. WIKTIONARY
  • tags requires players to assign adjectives to given topics. If other players agree, points are awarded. WIKTIONARY
  • three requires you to find a word beginning with a given set of three to five consonants (and possibly some vowels in between). YAWL
  • trivia is a trivia quiz using random wikipedia pages as input. Alternatively, the top 100.000 page titles of en.wikipedia can be used. WIKIPEDIA
  • wordsplay requires you to find the longest English word in a grid of 3x3 to 7x7 letters. YAWL

YAWL: Data base is the extensive YAWL word list.

WIKTIONARY: Data base are all English en.wiktionary definitions.

WIKIPEDIA: Data is generated live from en.wikipedia.

Some of the games may remind you of Anno Domini[tm], Apples to Apples[tm], Attribute[tm], Boggle[tm], or Taboo[tm]. But the rules usually differ in so far that these games are playable in an IRC channel, and optimized to use little screen estate for messaging.

Play

Play with us in irc://irc.foonetic.net/#puzzles or

Download the latest python source code via git:

git clone git://relet.net/phenny-games

or

git clone http://relet.net/git/phenny-games/.git

The folder modules contains the actual software modules. I assume you have set up a phenny installation and know your way around it. The folder wordlist contains exemplary word lists (and in future possibly some tools to generate them).

Known bugs

  • Some paths may still be hardcoded, but the code should be rather usable.
  • history does not handle players dropping out gracefully yet, but that only affects the gameplay.
  • Some bogus entries in the wordlists make the games of history and taboo all the more entertaining.

Other games

other games for phenny that I know of

  • UNO by Tamás Marki.