Playing chess, Monopoly or Scrabble in VBA in Excel

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Playing chess, Monopoly or Scrabble in VBA in Excel
Wise Owl have form for developing games in VBA (remember Flappy Owl, anyone?), but Tom Hedge has taken this one stage further by providing a portal to 3 popular games from a single webpage.

Posted by Andy Brown on 11 December 2023

In this blog

Monopoly
Scrabble
Chess

Tom Hedge has used VBA to create 3 different games that you can play in Excel, all of which you can see at (and download from) his website.

You can see some of our previous attempts at VBA games on this website, including Flappy Owl (our VBA version of Flappy Bird), Wordle and Hangman.

Monopoly

Even the board for Monopoly is impressive:

This is actually a 46 x 46 grid of cells.

The background sheets are well-organised:

The list of squares, with the rent for each (not shown above) and current owner.

All very impressive!

Scrabble

As a Scrabble addict, I was most interested in this game:

A Scrabble game in progress.

This game probably has the simplest code and fewest procedures: I suspect that it was the first to be created.

Chess

The chess game is probably the most sophisticated, as each piece's moves are controlled by a class:

A game of chess in progress.

The code used is not for the VBA beginner:

Object-oriented programming in VBA using classes is definitely an advanced feature!

I can only imagine how long it took to cater for all of the possible scenarios in chess!

I'm seriously impressed by these games. To be a good programmer you definitely need to be able to solve logical problems, but you also need a high level of patience and good attention to deal. It must have taken ages to iron out all the bugs in these games!

This blog has 2 threads

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From:	ChrisRees
When:	30 Jan 24 at 17:16

Did you purposefully make an error in the phrase "attention to detail" in the last section, to see if people would spot it ??

From:	Andy B
When:	30 Jan 24 at 18:36

No! But now I have to leave it in, otherwise your question will no longer make sense ...

From:	duggie
When:	15 Dec 23 at 00:00

The chess program is impressive but unfortunately it's buggy. It doesn't observe the 3 fold repetition, perpetual check and it allows castling, even when squares between the King and Rook are attacked.

From:	Andy B
When:	13 Jan 24 at 13:19

I had to Google 3-fold repetition!. I agree that this is an impressive tool, and think this is a bit nit-picking!

From:	Hedgemeister
When:	16 Dec 23 at 12:54

Thanks Duggie for your feedback on Excel VBA Chess. Every day is a school day as they say! I must say I hadn't come across threefold repetition or perpetual check before- niche but clearly important rules! I should really implement the rule that "you can castle with a rook that is under attack at the time, and the rook can pass through an attacked square when castling, while the king cannot." Have a good Christmas!

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