Salon

The need

Our game nights with friends had two enemies: the game left at home, and the friend who owns it but didn’t come.

Salon puts the games on the TV, and every phone becomes a controller. You scan a QR code and you play. There is nothing to install.

What made it tricky

• Hidden information: the roles in Werewolf or Avalon, the spymaster’s grid in Codename, the cards in Texas Hold’em. Each phone must see exactly what it is allowed to see, and nothing more.
• Dropouts mid-game: a phone locks, loses the wifi, reloads the page.
• Fourteen games, with timers and simultaneous actions, like the night phase in Werewolf.

Decisions

From a peer-to-peer page to an authoritative server

The first version fitted in one HTML page: Codename only, peer to peer, with the game state kept on the computer plugged into the TV.

For reliability, and to add games, I moved everything to a server. It holds the game state and sends each device only the view that concerns it. Reading your phone’s network traffic reveals nothing.

A decoy for those with nothing to do

At night, in Werewolf, players with no action still get a screen to fiddle with. Nobody can guess the roles by watching who touches their phone.

One room, one queue

Each room handles its actions one at a time, in order. Two players tapping at the same moment cannot corrupt the game. A tap that arrives too late for the current turn is refused, and a stale timer is ignored.

I wrote the server with Effect: it is a modern stack, composition keeps this kind of logic readable, and its types frame AI-assisted development well.

Getting your seat back

A phone that reconnects, even after being locked or reloaded, takes its place back in the game. The screen stays on while you play.

Dice rolled by the server

In Las Vegas, you shake your phone to roll. The server simulates the throw physically, from the strength of the gesture, and sends the trajectory, around ten kilobytes. The TV and the phones replay it in 3D, at the same moment.

Designed by me, written with Claude Code

I designed the architecture and steered the writing with Claude Code, over a weekend.

What made it possible to go fast without breaking things:

• games written as pure logic, tested game by game;
• a test that starts the real server and plays over WebSocket;
• interactive rules that run the real game logic.

Result

playable games, from Codename to Avalon

14

playable games, from Codename to Avalon

from the first page to the current version

1 weekend

from the first page to the current version

• Fourteen games playable online, including Codename, Werewolf, Avalon, Texas Hold’em and 6 nimmt!.
• Deployed on my cluster: Docker image, continuous integration, automatic updates through Flux.
• We really do play it on game nights, and Codename is the one that comes back most often.
• An accepted limit: games are kept in memory, on a single instance. A restart cuts the games in progress.