Hunt the Wumpus

<nostalgia>I had way too much fun with this.  After a discussion with students about mazes and various ways to represent and display them in computer programs, I ended up writing a Python version of Wumpus.  I don’t mean a 3D graphics version using Visual Python, or even the 1980 TI version with the Wumpus graphic that I see on t-shirts.  I mean the original text version by Gregory Yob.  I remember being fascinated by this game as a kid– it was very likely my first introduction to graph theory, with the rooms of the Wumpus’s cave connected like the vertices of a squashed dodecahedron.  (I love this helpful suggestion from the game’s instructions: “If you don’t know what a dodecahedron is, ask someone.”)

You can download the game at the usual location here.  Although there are many versions of Wumpus out there, I had a few specific requirements that none of them met.  This version still works in Python 2.7, and is a shot-for-shot re-make of the game, behaving exactly as it appeared where I first encountered it, re-printed in the 1979 book More BASIC Computer Games.  My only tweak was to use friendlier lower case text instead of the original all-upper case, and to fix a few typos in the re-print.</nostalgia>