Doing some work on Umpire lately. Umpire is a text-based clone of that wonderful game of yore, Empire: Wargame of the Century. Since 2016 I've used it as a playground for learning Rust and also more recently for experimenting with reinforcement learning.

The objective in this current wave of development is to port the code to a client-server architecture so the game can be played as online-multiplayer. That has me diving into tarpc and tokio for the first time. So far, so good. There's long been a separation between the abstract game logic and the user interface in Umpire, and this maps nicely to the server and client roles. I don't have far to go for a very dumb implementation---one where players have to sit around and wait for each other to take their turns. That fits easily with the current architecture which was designed for hotseat multiplayer, just like the original, but probably isn't the long-term destination.

As always, will keep you posted as things develop.

Pictured: the prior release, Umpire 0.4