Three Musketeers is played on a 5x5 grid. You probably don't want 25 almost identical listeners, right? In a case like this, it's much better to have one listener. But that listener needs to know which square of the grid was actually clicked on. In the current game, you might want row and column.

You might populate your 5x5 grid with various types of Components--for example, buttons, panels, or labels in panels. Or maybe something else. Here are three quick example programs to show off the basic techniques.

ButtonArray.java

In this program I wanted to use a grid full of JButtons. However, I want to ask the button what row and column it is in, and a plain old JButton doesn't know that. So I wrote a class MyButton that extends JButton with row and column information. (You can also use this trick with other component types, such as JPanel.)

LabelArray.java

This program uses labels. However, JLabels don't respond to mouse clicks, so I put each JLabel in a JPanel, and added a listener to each JPanel. In this example, I just get the text of the JLabel, but it might be more useful to extend the JPanel with row and column information.

PanelArray.java

This program is derived from LabelArray.java by removing the labels (and adding color information). All the same comments apply.