How to Play Penny Drop

Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack — by Michael Fazio (13 / 125)

👈 Chapter 1 Initialize the Penny Drop App | TOC | Create the App 👉

All of Part I of this book is focused on the game Penny Drop, so let’s make sure everyone’s comfortable with the rules. Penny Drop is a tabletop game for two or more players where the players take turns rolling a single D6 (normal six-sided dice are called D6s). The rules are as follows:

• Player rolls a number, then puts a penny (a small coin) into the slot number that they just rolled.
• If the slot is a 6, the penny falls through the board and is out of the game.
• If the slot is already filled, the player takes all the pennies on the board and play passes on to the next player.
• Players must roll at least once, but can then pass their turn to the next person.
• The first player to get rid of all their pennies is the winner.

As you can see, there isn’t a ton to this game: roll, put a penny or take pennies, repeat until someone’s out. This allows us to focus on the Android components rather than a ton of game logic (though we’ll have a bit we need to consider in Chapter 4, ​Update LiveData with Conditional Game Logic​). Given those rules, the Game screen of our app will end up looking like this: