The table dealt cards but settled money by editing a number. So the felt got
the two things it was missing: a bet spot in front of you, and the house's rack
beside the shoe. Every chip is now always travelling between one of those and
the other.
You build a bet by throwing chips onto the spot — the chip you clicked is the
chip that flies. The stake sits there through the hand. The house pays out of
its rack into the spot, and the pile is then swept back to your stack. A loss
goes to the rack and does not come back.
Two rules hold it together. The number under the pile is a readout of the pile,
never the other way round: the bet starts at nothing rather than at a default
nobody put down, and a settled hand leaves your stake back up on the spot,
because otherwise the panel prints "your bet: 300" over an empty circle. And
the chip bar does not move until the chips that justify it have landed — a
counter that pays you before the dealer turns over is a counter that has told
you the ending.
casino-fx.js is the engine underneath: chips fly on an arc, out of a fixed
overlay so no container clips one crossing from a button to the felt. It knows
nothing about blackjack.
Also: cards land with weight and a degree or two of tilt, so a hand looks dealt
rather than typeset; the dealer takes a beat before drawing out; and a natural
gets confetti, which is the only thing in the room that does.
Driven in a real browser, which is the only way to review an animation — and
which is what caught the verdict pill rendering white on white in a dark room,
a chip rack sitting on top of the dealer, and Hit being offered over a table
that was still being paid out. devcasino_test.go is that harness, kept.
The last attempt built a card face out of text: a "♠" in a span for every
pip. At the size a card actually is, a suit character renders as a speck —
the shape is whatever font answered, it doesn't scale, and it can't be put
on the half-row a real pip layout needs. The result read worse than the
plain rank it replaced.
So each face is one SVG on a 100×140 field, suits as vector shapes, pips at
the coordinates a printed deck puts them. Courts get a framed panel with the
suit above the letter and again below it upside down — mirroring a letter,
which is what the first pass did, just stacks two of them into a blob; a real
court mirrors a figure.
Also restores .pete-card-back, which went out with the text rules it was
sitting among: without it a face-down card had no back at all, so the
dealer's hole card was invisible on the felt. Caught by driving a hand.
The tables were living in the news app's shell: Pete's face in the header
and the footer, the channel nav, search, the reader, the weather canvas,
the PWA. A casino is not a news page with a felt on it.
So it gets its own layout. What carries over is the design language — the
four palette vars, Fredoka/Nunito, the fat rounded cards, the dropped
shadow. What doesn't is every control it has no use for. gamesPage stops
embedding the news pageData, which is what keeps the furniture from
drifting back one convenient field at a time.
It keeps a clock, but tells a different joke with it: Casinopolis by day,
Casino Night Zone from six, palette and felt and the sign over the door all
changing together. The rule lives in roomAt() for the first paint and again
in the browser, so a player abroad gets their own evening.
And the cards are cards now — corner indices in both corners, the bottom
one upside down as printed, pips on the three-by-seven grid every real deck
has used for four hundred years, courts as a letter with the suit over each
shoulder. Driven in a real browser, both rooms, dealt through to a payout.
The engine, the escrow and the wire were all in place; nothing had a browser on
the end of it. This is that end: a lobby, a table, and the five endpoints between
them.
The browser holds no game. It sends intents and gets back a view — the cards it
is entitled to see, and the script of how they arrived, one event per card off
the shoe. The dealer's hole card is not in the payload at all until the reveal,
because a field the client is told to ignore is a field somebody reads in
devtools. The shoe lives in game_live_hands, which also means a redeploy
mid-hand no longer costs a player their stake: the hand is still there when they
come back.
The money is ordered so nothing can be spent twice. The stake leaves the stack in
the same statement that checks it exists, before a card is dealt. Every new hand
is seated with a plain INSERT, so a double-clicked Deal is decided by the primary
key rather than by a read that raced — it loses, gets its chips back, and the
hand in progress is untouched. A double takes its raise up front and hands it
straight back if the engine refuses the move.
Cards are dealt rather than swapped in — they fly out of the shoe and turn over,
which was a requirement and not a flourish. The faces and the chips are still
plain; that's next.
