Class Diagram for the Online Blackjack Game

In this lesson, we’ll create the class diagram for the Blackjack game. We will first define the core classes, then identify their relationships to fully model the game’s structure according to our requirements.

Components of Blackjack

In this section, we’ll define the classes for the Blackjack game. As mentioned earlier, we are following the bottom-up approach to designing a class diagram for the Blackjack game.

Card

The Card class encapsulates the properties of a single playing card used in Blackjack. Each Card object is defined by its suit (hearts, spades, clubs, or diamonds) and face value (ranging from Ace to King). The class includes methods to determine the card’s Blackjack point value (with special handling for face cards and Aces) and to provide a human-readable string representation of the card.

Deck

The Deck class represents a standard 52-card playing deck, consisting of all possible suit and face value combinations. Upon instantiation, a Deck automatically populates itself with Card objects for each unique combination. Deck provides access to its list of cards, enabling shuffling, dealing, and integration into larger components like the Shoe.

Shoe

The Shoe class models the casino device that holds multiple shuffled decks of cards. It serves as the source for all card dealing during the game, ensuring a large enough card supply for extended play and fair distribution. Shoe is responsible for initializing itself with the required number of Decks, shuffling all the cards together, and providing cards one at a time for dealing to players and the dealer.

Hand

The Hand class represents the collection of cards currently held by a player or the dealer in a single round of Blackjack. It provides operations for adding new cards and computing the hand’s total point value, with intelligent handling of the Ace’s dual value (1 or 11) to optimize for the best score without busting.

Player, BlackJackPlayer, and Dealer

The Player class is an abstract base class that encapsulates all the common attributes and behaviors shared by participants in the Blackjack game. Each Player maintains identifying information, login credentials, account status, a running cash balance, and a reference to their personal details through the Person object. The Player class is also associated ...