Fibozzle, in Rust

Back in 2018 I wrote Fibbozle, a console game in C that plays like 2048 except tiles merge along the Fibonacci series — a 2 and a 3 make a 5, a 5 and an 8 make a 13. It was my first proper terminal project, and I have a soft spot for it.

In 2026 I wanted to learn Rust, and the best way I know to learn a language is to rebuild something I already understand completely. So Fibozzle became my Rust project: same game at its core, but this time built the way I’d build it today instead of the way I could manage back then.

What it became

The remake grew well past the original. It’s a full Ratatui TUI now, not just a redrawn grid:

• A welcome menu with New Game (pick a player name and any board size from 2x2 up to 8x8), Load Game, and High Scores.
• 2048-style colored tiles that shift through the palette as values climb.
• Undo for up to five moves, and save/resume — games are written to the platform data directory as compact binary files with an integrity checksum, so a casually edited save is detected and skipped on load.
• A leaderboard that ranks by highest Fibonacci tile reached, tie-broken by fewest moves, keeping the top 10 per board size.

The game logic itself was the part I was most careful with. All movement runs through a single shared shift_vector routine with slide-and-merge semantics, backed by a full directional test matrix plus whole-game simulation tests — including the subtle bits like valid-move detection counting plain slides, not just merges. Writing that in Rust, with the borrow checker looking over my shoulder, taught me more about ownership and module design than any tutorial had.

On Homebrew

The part I’d never done before: packaging. The release profile builds a lean fibozzle binary, and a tap makes it installable anywhere:

1brew install krushiraj/fibozzle/fibozzle
2fibozzle

Or, with Rust installed: cargo install --git https://github.com/krushiraj/fibozzle-rust.

There’s something very satisfying about a game I first wrote as a student in C being one brew install away for anyone with a terminal.