At MIT in 1973 I had to use RTL logic (lower density, speed, and fan-out than TTL) for my digital design lab. I decided to design a circuit that played perfect Nim on a board of one to four piles of up to 15 stones in each pile. It took around 20 JK Flip-flops to manage the game state and do the calculations plus more latches and muxes and demuxes for I/O.

My biggest problem was that I hadn’t yet learned to pick minimum viable projects that would still result in a good grade.