Driven in a browser for the first time, which is where three bugs were.
Every visit to /games/uno was a 500: the page was never added to the list
server.go parses into the games template set, so render() answered "unknown
page". The casino tests all call their handlers directly and never go through
render(), so nothing saw it. TestEveryCasinoPageRenders now walks the mux and
asks for every page the casino routes to.
The play script hid the first card that lit up rather than the one you clicked,
so playing any other playable card made an innocent card vanish. And on a phone
the discard sized its box but not its card, which takes its size from --uno-h,
so a full-size card hung out of a small hole and covered the colour in play.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013M5nD7PgUboJXoDcYHzpuJ
UNO, played for chips. You stake once, sit down against one to three bots,
and going out first pays the table: 2.2x heads up, 3.6x against a full house.
Anybody else going out first takes the stake. The table size is the tier,
because it is the only dial UNO has.
The bots move inside ApplyMove. A game with opponents is normally where you
reach for a socket, and the plan says solo UNO must not — so one request plays
your move and every bot turn behind it, and hands back the whole lap as a
script the felt plays in order.
The RNG is in the state rather than an argument to it: the bots choose and a
spent deck reshuffles, so the engine needs randomness mid-game, and there is no
generator alive across requests to pass in. The seed rides in the state and each
step derives its own. The game still replays exactly as it fell.
The zero value of Color is Wild, and that is the whole point of it: a wild
played with the colour field missing from the JSON must be refused, not
quietly played as a red one. It was red for an hour.
The browser never sees a bot's card — not the deck, not a hand, not the face of
a card a bot drew, which is most of the deck. Seats cross the wire as a name and
a count.
The multiples are measured, not guessed: playing the first legal card you hold
wins 43/32/27% of the time against these bots, so the tiers price that to lose
about 8% a game and leave good play worth roughly the house's edge.
PeteFX.flyNode is the throw with the chip taken out of it, so a card can be
thrown across the felt the same way. fly() is now that with a chip in it.
Not yet driven in a browser, which in this room means not yet finished.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013M5nD7PgUboJXoDcYHzpuJ
Trivia had every Go test passing and had never been in a browser, which
this plan's own rule says means nothing. So: play it.
The game itself holds up. The clock drains honestly and does not restart
on a reload, the multiple compounds, walking pays exactly what the felt
quoted, the reveal marks the right answer, and the auto-submit at zero
lands as a timeout rather than an illegal move. The next question's
answer never crosses the wire.
Two bugs only the browser could show:
- The spot printed double the stake after every settled game. standing()
set spot.amount and *then* poured the chips on, and pour grows the pile
from what it is told is already there. The money was always right; the
number under the chips was not, which is the one rule the felt is built
on.
- The house rack sat on top of the multiplier at 390px. Its 5.75rem inset
is not a margin, it is the width of blackjack's shoe — so on a phone the
rack sits in the middle of the felt. It now shrinks on small screens and
pulls into the corner where the corner is empty; data-at says which rack
is which, because pulling blackjack's to the edge slides it under the
deck.
The dev rig seeds its own question bank now (one real OpenTDB batch per
difficulty), because a fresh dev database 503s every start otherwise.
Solitaire, Vegas rules — the only shape solitaire has ever had as a
gambling game. You don't win or lose the deal: the stake buys the deck
outright, and every card you get home to a foundation pays a fifty-second
of the tier's multiple back. Cash the board whenever you like and keep
what you've banked, so a board that has gone dead is a decision rather
than a wall. No undo: the stake is spent the moment the deck is bought,
and an undo would be a way to walk a losing board backwards until it wins.
Three deals, and the two dials are the whole difficulty of Klondike.
Patient draws one with unlimited passes and pays 1.4x, so it takes 38
cards home to get square. Vegas draws three, three times round, 2.2x,
square at 24. Cutthroat draws three and gives you one pass, 3.4x, square
at 16 — most of those boards never clear, and you're ahead long before
they would.
internal/games/klondike is the same pure reducer as the other two, and
Pays() is one function for the same reason hangman's is. Two fuzzers hold
the deck together: no sequence of moves can lose or duplicate a card, and
the board stays well-formed. They earned their keep immediately — the
first thing they caught was a recycle that reversed the waste. It flips as
a block, so the card drawn first comes out first, and reversing it would
have dealt a different game on every pass and quietly broken the seed in
the audit log.
The browser never sees the stock or a face-down card, which here is most
of the deck rather than blackjack's one hole card: a column sends how many
cards are under it, never which.
The table re-renders and animates the difference. Blackjack plays back a
script because a hand only ever grows at one end; solitaire moves runs
from anywhere to anywhere and an auto-finish moves eleven cards at once,
so a script of "append this card there" would be a second engine over here
and it would be the one that's wrong. Instead the board on screen is
always exactly the board the server says exists, and each card is played
from where it just was to where it now is. The events supply only what a
diff can't: where a newly-revealed card came from, and what the board is
worth.
The rules are mirrored in JS on purpose, and only to light up the columns
a held card can go to. Being shown where a card goes is the game teaching
you; being told no after you commit is the game scolding you. The server
still decides, and a disagreement snaps the board back to what it says.
Two things came out into the open rather than being copied, which is the
rule this room runs on: casino-cards.js (the deck — faces, pips, the flip)
and PeteFX.spot() (the pile of chips and the number under it, which now
owns the rule that the number is a readout of the pile). Blackjack uses
both.
Not yet driven in a browser.
Hangman, and it plays for chips — which the plan had down as a free game, on
the grounds that trivia has no euro coupling in gogobee. But a free game in a
casino reads as a demo, so it stakes like everything else.
The idea that makes it a casino game rather than hangman with a wager stapled
on: the gallows is the payout meter. A wrong guess draws a limb *and* takes a
tenth off what a win is worth, because those are the same event and showing
them as one is the entire reason to bet on this. Short phrases pay 2.6x (fewer
letters, less to go on), long ones 1.6x — the floor is 1x, so a win never hands
back less than the stake, and the rake still comes out of winnings only.
State.Pays() is the number the felt quotes and the number settle() lands on.
They were briefly two sums, and the table spent an afternoon advertising a
pre-rake payout it didn't honour.
Two things the storage layer had already decided for us, and one it hadn't:
game_live_hands is keyed on the player, so "one game at a time" holds across
games for free (a live hangman 409s a blackjack deal, stake intact). But
table() unmarshalled every live row as a blackjack hand, which does not fail on
a hangman row — it quietly yields an empty hand. It dispatches on the game now.
commit() is the settle path both games share, and casinoRoutes() the one route
list, since the dev rig wires its own mux and a second copy is a copy that stops
including the newest game.
Driven in a browser, win and loss: 200 at 2.34x paid 455 and the bar landed on
it; six wrong took the stake and no more; a reload mid-phrase brought back the
board, the limbs, the multiple, the spent keys and the chips on the spot. The
browser found the two bugs a Go test can't — a lives counter under the house
rack, and a word wrapping early because the rack's clearance was on the whole
column instead of the one row beside it.
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 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.
Three bearer-authed endpoints and gogobee can work the border: poll what's
waiting, claim a row, report what happened to the money. The storage layer
underneath was already done; this is the transport, and deliberately nothing
more.
All three are idempotent, because the thing on the other end of them is a
retrying queue and the thing they move is money. A verdict delivered three
times creates chips once. A rejected buy-in moves nothing and clears the
pending amount so it stops eating the table cap. A cash-out gogobee couldn't
pay gives the chips back rather than vanishing them from both sides.
A verdict for a row Pete has never heard of is a 400, not a shrug: gogobee has
by then moved real euros against it, and no amount of retrying invents the
missing row. Under the contract the adventure seam set, a 400 parks it in
gogobee's queue where a human can find it.
