Board Game Arena

Hi folks!

Today I'm facing a problem about how to deal with a multiplayer phase. I'm in a multiplayer state where all players must choose a card to play first. Once all players make their decision, then all cards are meld in player board. It is very similar to the game mecanism in 6nimmt.

So I want to keep track of who will play which card using an array as a global variable. First I want that array empty at the setup (let's call it $chosen_cards). Then when a player make is decision and his move is valid on server side, I want to update that array like this: (with $card an array representing the information about the chosen card). Then, when all players have made their choice, I jump to a game state where I read the contents of this array in order to make the play.

I've tried two things to do so so far:

#1: add 'chosen_card' as a global variable in self::initGameStateLabels and use the getter and setter: impossible because this mecanism can handle only scalar variables, not arrays .

#2: initialise the variable as $this->chosen_card in material.inc.php: seems awkward to me because this file is there to stoke game material information, not current situation. Anyway, this solution fails because the array seems re-initialized each time I want to update it to resolve player move.

I think I could design a specific table in database to handle this but I feel that solution very overwhelming.
What solution do I get left before I have to do that?

On BGA, all the data which persists during a game is kept into the database. Don't be shy to use it !
initGameStateLabels is just a shortcut to write scalars into the database.
Php variables are destroyed between http requests so $this->chosen_card is unfortunately not a solution.
Creating tables that will never have more than 10 rows is indeed a bit extreme, but it has to have benefits only admins know of ^^

I used to have only one MySQL table in which I loaded and stored serialized php variables, but admins told me it was bad practice.
Actually, my state functions were something like function stNextTurn(&$game, &$playerList, &$activePlayerIds) so game data and player data were automatically loaded and saved ^^
This solution took way too much work to create for its benefits, and admins have good reasons to ask us not to do this.

Thanks for your reply Pikiou.

Understood I'll do that