Overdraft — A Card Game the Whole Room Plays

Everyone plays on their own phone and the tables show on the screen at the front. A full card game — hands, turns, a live draw pile, wilds, calling out the player who forgot to say they were down to one — written from scratch rather than adapted from anything. A room splits into tables of three to six and every table plays its own hand, so a quick table never waits on a slow one. The rules live on the server: a phone is told its own cards and which of them are legal and decides nothing itself, so a tampered-with phone cannot play a card it does not hold. Five modes change what a turn costs, from no extra rules at all to playing on credit that doubles. Nothing to install and no accounts — the phones just open a web page. On your own, it plays against bots.

Open the game

Needs wifi. One of 3 tools here that run on a server instead of being a self-contained offline file. Everything else in the library is a file you keep.

Problem

Energy goes after lunch, and the usual fix is an energiser that needs props, printing, or floor space the room has not got.

Who it helps

Facilitators with a room on wifi who want a break that is still something the room does together — three to thirty people, everyone on their own phone.

In training

Open the room on the projector and read the four-character code out. Everyone joins on their phone and picks a face, the room splits itself into tables of three to six, and the screen at the front shows every table at once: whose turn it is, how many cards each player is holding, and which way play is going. A turn that nobody takes passes on its own after forty-five seconds, so one person wandering off does not stop their table.

Skills shown

Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, WebSocket hibernation, server-authoritative game rules, a rules engine tested apart from the interface, real-time front end.