I was asked to write this a few month’s back and it took me 2 or 3 evenings. It’s 312 lines long in just one file. Hopefully there are enough sensible function and variable names to make sense of it.

It runs in a terminal. It was compiled with Visual Studio but should not need many changes to compile with gcc/clang. (I hope!).

I made extensive use of pointers. For instance this function uses pointers in a for-loop.

int InDanger(char piece, int * x, int * y) {

    for (*y = 0; *y < 3; (*y)++) {
        if (CountRows(piece, y,0)==2) return 1;
    }

    for (*x = 0; *x < 3; (*x)++) {
        if (CountCols(piece, x,0) == 2) return 2;
    }
    *x = 0;
    if (CountDiagonal(piece, x,0) == 2) return 3;
    *x = 2;
    if (CountDiagonal(piece, x,0) == 2) return 4;

    return 0; // no danger
}

I’ve added this to the GitHub C games repository and updated the C games source page.