The Chameleon - Telegram game bot

Table of contents

Introduction Official Chats Game Rules Decks Translations Options How to run your own instance

Introduction

This bot lets you play the game The Chameleon in Telegram groups! You can find it here: https://t.me/TheChameleonBot It features the game itself, an tournament mode, a waitlist, a variety of translations and different card decks (both which you can do on your own and add to the game).

Official Chats

The official Chats are used by the official bot itself.

• The development channel
• The support group. In case you still have questions :D Or want to report bugs
• The translation channel. For updates to the translation file
• The translation group. For questions/submitting your own translations or decks
• The official english group to play the game
• The official german group to play the game

Game rules

Based on the official ones

• After the game starts, one players gets to be the chameleon, the other one are simple players
• A topic and a belonging word list is presented, with a button attached to it
• If you are a player and press this button, one of the words of this list is presented to you (called the secret word) - everybody gets to see the same word. If you are the chameleon, you will be informed about this fact instead
• Now the bot asks one after another about a description of the secret word.
• If you are a player, try to describe the secret word in a way that the chameleon can't guess it; but other players know certainly that you are not the chameleon
• If you are the chameleon, you have to choose a description based on your very limited knowledge. Try to blend in with your choice!
• After everyone said a word, everybody gets to vote on who they think is the chameleon. The role of the one with the most votes gets unmasked
• If it is an ordinary player, the chameleon wins!
• If it is the chameleon, it will try to guess the secret word. If its guess is indeed correct, it still wins; otherwise the player do!

Decks

Decks are collection of "cards". You can create new decks or change existing ones. They are simple json files. In case you create a new deck, keep in mind that you set the topic/name of the deck with the name of the json file. Please keep it short and capitalize the first letter, since it will appear as an InlineKeyboardButton and looks better this way. One word only. Inside the json file, you define keys, which are the topic of the words, and then create a list with fitting words. Only strings are allowed in the list. 16 words per topic are recommended, but not required. You can look at actual implementations here and join us over here in case you have questions or want to submit a file.

Translations

You can translate the whole bot! The files are .yaml files, they should be edible in every basic text program, but Notepad ++ is a recommendation from us :) If you actually take on this challenge, you can find existing translations here. Once you download the base file (en (English) is recommended, since its always the most updated file), rename it with the ISO 639-1 code of your language. The two letter one is recommended, but not enforced. Translate the parts in the quotation marks. In case you want to actually use quotation marks in your strings, escape them like that: \" . Let the curly brackets stay and don't change their number. Telegrams formatting is supported with html tags, they worked as described here. After you are finished, join us here to submit this file or to ask further questions.

Options

The bot supports a few settings for games. These can be changed by running /settings in a group. The bot will send you a private message. The following settings are supported:

• Language - Change the language of the bot in your group
• Deck - Set the deck of cards used in your group
• Fewer - If only three players are playing (and this is activated), the chameleon, if caught, gets two guesses.
• More - If 7 or 8 players are playing (and this is activated), the words vanish once everyone has said their word, making it harder for the chameleon to guess the correct one.
• Tournament - If this mode is activated, a scoring system is introduced. If the chameleon escapes undetected, it gets two points. If it gets caught and guesses the correct word, it gets one point. If it doesn't, the player get two points each. The first player making it to 5 points wins.
• Pin - Once activated, the bot will silently pin the word list so players can find it easier once a game is started. It will pin the old pinned message (if existing) silently again when the game ends. In order to activate this setting, you need to make the bot an admin with pin privileges.
• Restrict - Once activated, the bot will restrict everyone from writing except the person whose turn it is during the word saying phase. Everyone can write again after this phase is over. In order for this to work, it will promote those users to admins with add member rights, since admins aren't restricted. The original chat permissions are restored after the phase. In order to activate this setting, you need to make the bot an admin with add new admins, restrict members and add members privileges. For more information, read the FAQ item below.

How to run your own instance

You just need to install the requirements via pip install -r requirements.txt. Then you need to install MongoDB. Rename example.config.py to config.py and insert your own values. And then run bot.py. Easy as that :D