About Hunt the Wumpus

Hunt the Wumpus was one of the first interactive computer games. It is often cited as the first Interactive Fiction game, and sometimes as the first game written for a microprocessor (as opposed to a minicomputer or mainframe). As usual Wikipedia has  a fine background article about it. There are several online implementations of the game so you can try it out before we begin building our own version. The original version was written in 1970 in BASIC, but it has since been translated into many other languages (including Python). For interest, here's the original BASIC source code— users would type this in (!) in order to play the game.

I hope you realized from its age that this is a text-based game and not a graphical first person shooter. If not, this short game transcript should make it clear, and also demonstrate the game and explain the rules:

Welcome to "Hunt the Wumpus"

The wumpus lives in a cave of 20 rooms. Each room has 3 tunnels to
other rooms. (Look at a dodecahedron to see how this works. If you
don't know what a dodecahedron is, ask someone.)

Hazards:
 Bottomless pits - Two rooms have bottomless pits in them. If you go
 there, you fall into the pit (& lose)!
 Super bats - Two other rooms have super bats. If you go there, a
 bat grabs you and takes you to some other room at random (which
 may be troublesome).

Wumpus:
 The wumpus is not bothered by hazards. (He has sucker feet and is
 Too big for a bat to lift.) Usually he is asleep. Two things
 wake him up: Your shooting an arrow, or your entering his room.
 If the wumpus wakes, he moves (p=.75) one room or stays still
 (p=.25). After that, if he is where you are, he eats you up and
 you lose!

You:
 Each turn you may move or shoot a crooked arrow.
 Moving: You can move one room (Through one tunnel).
 Arrows: You have 5 arrows. You lose when you run out. Each
 arrow can go from 1 to 3 rooms. You aim by telling the
 computer the rooms to which you want the arrow to go. If the
 arrow can't go that way (if no tunnel) it moves at random to
 the next room.
 If the arrow hits the wumpus, you win.
 If the arrow hits you, you lose.

Warnings:
 When you are one room away from a wumpus or hazard, the computer
 says:
 Wumpus: "I smell a wumpus!"
 Bat : "Bats nearby!"
 Pit : "I feel a draft!"

You are in room 12.
There are tunnels to rooms 11, 13, and 19.
I feel a draft!
Shoot, move, or quit (s/m/q)? m
To which room (11, 13, or 19)? 13
AEEEIIIIII! You fell into a pit!

I won't make you ask by email about the dodecahedron :-) A dodecahedron looks like this:

In our game the vertices (the corners or points) correspond to the locations of the rooms, and the edges (or ridgelines) correspond to the tunnels that connect caves. You can see that each cave is connected to three others. For our purposes it is easier to work with a "squashed" version (imagine someone steps on the 3-D picture above and squashes it flat):