wopr

SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?

wopr is a terminal recreation of the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) computer from the 1983 film WarGames. You dial in, log on, talk to WOPR, and play the games on its list. One of them is Global Thermonuclear War, which cannot be won.

It is one small program for Linux, macOS and Windows, with nothing else to install. It never uses the network, and it collects no data.

The documentation site explains how to install wopr, every option, how to play each game (with tips for winning), movie mode, and how to contribute.

Status: under construction. Every game on the list is playable, since v0.1.0, and movie mode (--movie) replays the film's terminal scenes. WOPR's lines are the film's own, checked against frame-by-frame transcriptions of its screens. docs/PLAN.md has the plan and the milestones.

Install

The installation guide has a download button for each system, with the steps to install what you download. The downloads are the Windows installer, the Mac app and the Linux packages. None of them needs a command line. The guide's command line section has one line to copy for Windows, macOS or Linux. The line downloads wopr and installs it.

You can also download the program for your system from the latest release, or build it with Go:

go install github.com/GhostofGoes/WOPR/cmd/wopr@latest

Each release also has a Windows installer, a Mac app (WOPR.app in a .dmg), and .deb and .rpm packages for Linux. The Linux packages install the manual page too (man wopr). You can start WOPR from the Start menu, from Applications, or from your Linux app menu. The installer and the app are not signed yet, so Windows and macOS warn about them the first time. The guide says what to click. Every release file has a build-provenance attestation, which you can check: see Verifying binaries.

Quick start

wopr

Wait for LOGON:. If you saw the film, you know what to type. If not, wopr --help tells you.

Once you are logged on, talk to WOPR. Type LIST GAMES, then pick a game by its name or by its place in the list. Type LOGOFF to leave. Ctrl+C always quits.

Screenshots

All screenshots come from the program itself, in an 80×24 terminal with the default white-phosphor theme.

Logon and the film's conversation	Global Thermonuclear War's big board
The climax: zero players	Chess
Black Jack	Falken's Maze

The big board's map: Map (C) 1998 Matthew Thomas. Freely usable if this line is included.

Games

Every game in LIST GAMES is playable. Each has its own ASCII art: title pieces, card faces and trick tables, framed boards, and a picture of the front in the war games. Global Thermonuclear War draws the outlines of the two nations from Natural Earth data, and its big board uses Matthew Thomas's ASCII world map. See NOTICE.md.

• Falken's Maze (maze): find the exit with the arrow keys (or WASD). q gives up. WOPR watches which way you turn, and it moves walls that you did not see yet. The exit always stays reachable.
• Desert Warfare (desert): give each unit one order in turn: move 4 or move sollum, attack 5, or hold. status shows the map, help lists the orders, and end holds the rest. Take Benghazi, or hold more of the road after ten turns. A unit cut off from its depot attacks at half strength.
• Fighter Combat (dogfight): each turn, pick a manoeuvre (press, extend, climb, break, fire) while WOPR picks its own. Missiles work at range, and guns work close in from behind. Two hits bring an aircraft down. disengage at long range ends the fight even.
• Guerrilla Engagement (guerrilla): your cells hide (hide), ambush from hiding at double strength (attack 4), and recruit when you have support. Patrols find cells near them. Survive twelve turns, reach support 10, or take the capital.
• Air-to-Ground Actions (air-to-ground): six sorties against six defended targets. Set a package (target radar strike 4 sead 2 escort 2) and type go. SEAD aircraft fight the target's SAM sites, escorts keep the interceptors busy, and WOPR hides a mobile SAM battery where it expects you. Ten points win.
• Theaterwide Tactical Warfare (tactical): corps and air wings on a European front. Any unit may escalate. Each rung adds to every attack, WOPR answers in kind, and the top rung ends everything. Hold five regions to win.
• Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare (biotoxic): release 4 puts an agent on a region, and decon cleans a little. The agent spreads with the wind. Nobody wins.
• Global Thermonuclear War (gtw): choose a side and list the enemy's cities to target. An empty line ends the list, and list shows the targets on file. The first strike flies at once. Then order two more strikes as percentages of your ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers (50 25 100, icbm 50, hold) while DEFCON falls to 1. Enter carries out WOPR's war plan, and hands it the rest. WOPR holds a quarter more of everything. Then try to stop it.

Movie mode

wopr --movie replays the film's scenes at WOPR's terminal, typed and paced as on screen, through the same console and games you play with. wopr --scenes lists them:

 1. first-contact    LOGON ATTEMPTS, HELP AND THE LIST OF GAMES
 2. joshua           THE BACKDOOR, THE GREETING AND A GAME OF CHOICE
 3. first-strike     A SIDE, TWO TARGETS AND THE BIG BOARD
 4. call-back        WOPR CALLS BACK TO FINISH THE GAME
 5. norad-terminal   JOSHUA AT NORAD: KILL RATIOS AND FALKEN'S ADDRESS
 6. climax           DEFCON 1, TIC-TAC-TOE AND A STRANGE GAME

• wopr -m opens a menu of the scenes. Type a number or a name, or q to leave.
• wopr -m 3 (or wopr -m first-strike, or any unique start of a name) plays from that scene to the end of the list, then exits.
• wopr -m 3 --only (or -o) plays only that scene, then exits. wopr -m --only opens the menu. Each scene you pick there plays alone, and then the menu returns.
• While a scene plays: Space pauses and resumes. n or → skips to the next scene. p or ← goes back one scene. Esc opens the menu. Ctrl+C quits. With --only, the scene that n or p reaches also plays alone. Once the climax reaches tic-tac-toe, it plays to the end, and any other key only says so.
• Every replay is the same: movie mode ignores --seed and WOPR_SEED. --theme and --reduce-motion still apply. --instant shows each line at once instead of typing it, but the scenes still pause, so that you can read every page.

The only film text in the scenes is what WOPR's terminal shows on screen, David's typing included. There is no dialogue that is only spoken. The dial, GTW's strike exchange, tic-tac-toe's prompts and the game clock's ticking are this project's own. Every line carries a provenance tag (NOTICE.md). The film's lines are its own screen text, checked against frame-by-frame transcriptions of the film (docs/PLAN.md §2.3), and they are never changed.

Command-line flags

Flag	Meaning
-v, --version	print the version and exit
-h, --help	print help and exit
-g, --games	list the games and exit
-S, --scenes	list the movie's scenes and exit
-L, --licenses	print the licence notices and exit
-p, --play <game>	start a game at once (by number, name, alias or unique prefix). wopr <game> does the same
-m, --movie [scene]	replay the film's WOPR scenes from that scene on, or pick one from a menu. See Movie mode
-o, --only	with --movie, play only the chosen scene, then stop
-t, --theme <name>	imsai (white phosphor, the default), green, amber or norad. Also WOPR_THEME
-i, --instant	no typewriter pacing. Also WOPR_INSTANT=1
-s, --seed <n>	a repeatable run. Also WOPR_SEED
-r, --reduce-motion	no blinking, still front-panel lights, and no speed-ups in the ending (-i also skips the animations). Also WOPR_REDUCE_MOTION=1

NO_COLOR (any value but an empty one) turns colour off.

Accessibility

• Meaning in characters, not just colour. Outgoing missiles are +, and incoming ones are *. > marks the current DEFCON level. Every card shows its suit letter, and an edged card (.===.) is winning the trick. Gin Rummy names your melds, and chess and checkers bracket the last move. Set NO_COLOR to turn colour off.
• --reduce-motion (-r, or WOPR_REDUCE_MOTION=1) stops the blinking, holds the front-panel lights still, and keeps the ending at a steady pace. Nothing ever flashes more than three times a second.
• --instant (-i, or WOPR_INSTANT=1) shows text and board moves at once, instead of one character at a time. Any key also finishes the line that WOPR is typing.
• Plain text. Everything on screen is plain ASCII. Prompts end with a question mark or a colon, and the cursor sits where you type. WOPR writes its moves in words, and Hearts and Bridge say which cards are already in the trick before you play.
• Contrast. In every theme, text meets the WCAG AA contrast ratio (4.5:1), and dim text meets 3:1. Every style keeps at least 3:1 in 16-colour terminals.

Nobody has tried the full-screen interface with a screen reader yet. Reports are welcome.

Troubleshooting

• "standard output is not a terminal": run wopr directly in a terminal, not through a pipe. On Windows, use Windows Terminal. mintty without ConPTY is not supported.
• "TERMINAL TOO SMALL": WOPR needs at least 80 columns and 24 rows.
• Strange colours: try --theme green, or set NO_COLOR=1.
• The mouse wheel changes what I typed: on WOPR's full screen, some terminals (GNOME Terminal and other VTE-based ones) turn the wheel into ↑ and ↓, which step through the lines you typed. Scroll back with PgUp and PgDn. wopr leaves mouse reporting off, so that you can select and copy text as usual.
• Reporting a bug: run with WOPR_DEBUG=1. wopr writes a debug log (never what you type) and prints the log's path when it exits. Attach the log to a bug report, with --seed (or WOPR_SEED) if you used one. Ask questions in Discussions.

The docs site's Troubleshooting page has more.

Development builds

Every CI run builds all six targets and keeps one download per platform. Open a CI run on main and, under Artifacts, download the one for your platform, for example wopr_0.0.1-snapshot.1a2b3c4_linux_amd64 or ..._windows_amd64.exe (about 6 MB). It is the bare binary. On Linux and macOS, make it executable with chmod +x. wopr --licenses prints its licence and notices. Downloads from main stay available for 30 days. Builds from other branches (7 days) and pull requests (3 days) are for testing only.

Building and contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. The commands and conventions are in AGENTS.md.

Credits and licence

The code is MIT licensed. See LICENSE. The MIT grant does not cover the film quotations and the third-party text. NOTICE.md explains what they are and who owns them. This is a fan-made homage. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the makers or owners of WarGames.