Three more card games, engine to screen.
Kaiser: 32-card prairie trick-taking with bidding, the five of hearts
worth five and the three of spades costing three. Bidding is capped at
ten because ten is all a hand can be worth, and a losing score gives the
game a floor — without one a table that keeps bidding and going down
never reaches a result.
Crazy 8s: eights are wild and name the suit in force, which is why the
table states that suit in words rather than leaving it to be read off
the pile. Blocked rounds are scored rather than hanging.
Wizard: the 60-card deck, one more card dealt each round until the pack
runs out, bid your tricks exactly. The shared card model gains WIZARD
and JESTER ranks, so every ordinary deck now builds from Rank.standard
rather than walking the whole enum.
Also fixes a lobby bug this would have hit: hosting seated the
catalogue minimum rather than the table the host had just set up, so a
six-handed game would have been rejected by its own rules engine.
164 engine tests pass locally.
Two separate faults. The pattern was wrong, and the scale was broken.
Pattern: the sett is published as K/4 R32 K32 Y/4, the slashes marking
pivots, which reflects out to K4 R32 K32 Y4 K32 R32 — 136 threads, about
half black and half red with a yellow line worth 3%. I had the structure
inverted: the yellow overstripe belongs down the centre of a wide black
band, and the narrow black guard belongs between two red blocks. Mine put
yellow between narrow blacks and the wide black elsewhere, which is why it
read as a generic check rather than as Wallace.
Scale: thread width was a fixed fraction of the screen while the sett grew
from 84 threads to 216, so a repeat became 933dp on a 360dp phone and only
0.39 of one was ever visible. The cloth had zoomed into a few enormous
blocks and stopped being a weave at all — that is the part that got worse,
not the colours. Thread width is now derived from the sett, so a couple of
full repeats are on screen whatever the threadcount says, and changing the
count rescales instead of silently magnifying.
The icon is generated from the same numbers at one repeat across the
adaptive safe zone.
Threadcount cross-checked against two independent sources rather than
guessed; recorded in Tartan.kt and the README so the next change starts
from the published figures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
The old sett was three flat stripes in roughly equal measure, which read
as a generic red-and-black check rather than as Wallace. Rebuilt against
a reference swatch.
- Setts are now written as a half-sett and reflected about their pivots,
the way a threadcount is actually published, so the data stays in the
form it is quoted in instead of a flat list kept symmetric by hand.
- Wallace is gold 6, black 6, red 36, black 24, red 36, black 6: a red
ground at about two thirds, black bands alternating wide and narrow,
and one thin gold overstripe per repeat. The reflection puts black on
both sides of the gold line, which is what the reference shows.
- Colours taken from the swatch: a brighter scarlet and a stronger gold
than before.
- Both the cloth and the icon are turned 45 degrees. The renderer draws
well past the canvas edges so the corners stay covered once rotated.
The icon vector is generated from the same numbers rather than written
out by hand, so the icon and the splash cannot drift apart — changing
the sett rebrands both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
- An 8-card variant, laid out as two rows of four. The existing column
scoring covers it without change.
- Opening cards are now chosen rather than dealt face up. Nothing starts
revealed; each player in turn turns over their allowance, and the hole
begins once everyone has picked. This needed a new SETUP phase in the
engine, since it is a real decision and has to be validated like any
other move rather than being decided at deal time.
- "Line up the final putt", off by default: throw a drawn card away
without turning your last face-down card over, so you are not forced to
close the hole on a card you did not choose. Only offered on the last
face-down card. Because a whole table could otherwise decline forever,
two full laps of nothing but thrown cards calls the hole and scores it
where it stands.
- The end of a hole now shows a score card — every player's strokes for
the hole and their running total, lowest first — and the next hole is
not dealt until it is dismissed. MatchController gained a general
awaitsConfirmation hook for this, so any game wanting a scoreboard
between rounds can stop the table the same way. Only the host waits;
clients render what they are sent.
Nine more Golf tests, covering the 8-card layout, the opening choice,
when the putt option is and is not offered, and that a table refusing to
putt out still finishes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
Two more games on the existing framework — no changes were needed to the
lobby, networking, settings or update layers, which is what the shared
GameRules/GameAi contract was for.
President
- Threes low, twos high. Lead any number of one rank; follow with the
same count of a higher rank, or pass. When everyone has passed the
pile comes down and the last player to play leads again.
- Toggles: player count, rounds, twos clear the pile, four of a kind
bombs, and the between-round card exchange.
- Plays are offered as whole sets rather than by selecting cards. A set
is the unit of the game, so choosing from the legal sets is both
easier to operate and impossible to get wrong.
Golf
- 4, 6 or 9 card grids. Draw from stock or discard, then either swap the
card in or — only if it came off the stock — throw it and turn one of
your own over. A card taken from the discard pile has to be used.
- Matching columns cancel to nothing; on the 3x3 board rows do too, but
not on the shallower grids where three cards are not a line.
- Face-down cards are hidden from everyone including their owner, which
is the point of the game: viewFor masks them with a fixed placeholder
so the real card never reaches the device that has not turned it over.
Both engines are pure Kotlin and unit tested — 71 tests now, covering
ranking, legal moves, pile and hole resolution, scoring, redaction, wire
round-trips, and full random and AI playthroughs. The Golf test also
checks the AI actually beats random play rather than merely being legal.
Also widened the setup screen's option chips to wrap: the reveal-count
row carries up to ten, and a chip off the edge of the screen is a
setting that cannot be changed — the same failure as the Euchre Pass
button.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
BoxWithConstraints exposes maxWidth and maxHeight on its own scope, but
inside Column the implicit receiver becomes ColumnScope and they are no
longer reachable, so the two font-size expressions failed to compile.
Read the constraints once into locals at the top of the BoxWithConstraints
body, which is what the Euchre and Sequence screens already do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
- The launcher icon is a single square of the tartan, drawn as a vector
so it stays sharp at any density and ships no PNGs. The adaptive
icon's foreground is deliberately empty: the cloth is the icon.
- Tartan.kt draws the sett as warp, then as weft at half opacity. That
overlap is what gives the blended squares and reads as woven cloth
rather than a printed grid, and it is reused by both the icon and the
splash.
- The app opens on the tartan under "Pro Libertate Games" in Uncial
Antiqua, holds two seconds, then fades. It is an overlay rather than a
destination, so the menu is already composed behind it and the fade
reveals a live screen. The window background is set to a dark red so
launch does not flash white before Compose draws.
Two things to be aware of:
- WallaceSett is an approximation. It reads as Wallace — bold red and
black check with a narrow gold overstripe — but the registered
threadcount could not be verified here, so the counts were chosen to
look right. They are plain data and can be swapped for the registered
ones without touching anything else.
- Uncial Antiqua is bundled under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, with
the full licence at docs/licenses/UncialAntiqua-OFL.txt. The OFL
requires that to be distributed with the font, so it must not be
separated from it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
A release listed all eleven games with nine of them marked "Coming
soon", so most of the menu was a dead end for anyone installing from the
production channel. Production now lists only what can be played; dev
builds still show everything, which is where seeing the roadmap is
useful.
The menu reads the installed APK's own version name, so this follows the
build rather than the update channel selected for the future — a dev
build shows the full list even if its owner has switched back to
production for updates.
CatalogTest pins both views, including that filtering never empties a
category and strands its heading.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
A jack's power is carried by its artwork on a real deck — drawn in
profile it shows one eye and removes a chip, drawn face-on it shows two
and is wild. These cards render as rank and suit only, so J♦ and J♠ were
indistinguishable in hand despite doing opposite things.
Jacks in hand now carry the word on their face, and the hint under the
hand says what tapping will do rather than the generic "tap a highlighted
square", which was wrong for a one-eyed jack anyway — those target an
opponent's chip, not a highlighted empty square.
The caption is a general PlayingCardView option, so any later game whose
cards carry meaning beyond rank and suit can use it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
The real cause of being forced to pick up the turn card was the AI, not
the Pass button. Measured over 2000 deals, the computer ordered up on
100% of them and the dealer was dragged into picking up on 97.2% —
bidding never once reached the second round, so a human dealer never got
a say. Average hand scored about 11 against a bid threshold of 9, so
essentially every hand bid.
- Voids no longer count towards a hand unless there is trump left to ruff
with, which was inflating precisely the weak hands that should pass.
- Thresholds recalibrated against the actual score distribution.
- EuchreBiddingRateTest pins the result so this cannot drift back: now
32.8% ordered up in round one, dealer forced to pick up on 12.8%, and
round two reached on 67%.
Finished tricks are now held and swept, for this and any later
trick-taking game:
- The engine kept a trick only until it resolved, so the fourth card was
never visible — it vanished the instant it landed. Completed tricks are
now retained in state until the next card is played.
- The table holds them for a second, names the winner, then slides all
four towards that player's edge and fades them out. The hold scales
with the animation speed setting.
- MatchController gains a general holdBeforeNextMove hook so the AI waits
out the animation rather than playing over it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
Clearing the name put "Player" straight back before a real one could be
typed. Three things combined to cause it:
- setPlayerName coerced a blank value to "Player" on write, so deleting
the last character immediately persisted the default.
- The settings flow then emitted that default, and the text field's
remember was keyed on the stored name, so it re-seeded itself from the
value that had just been written.
- The default also lived in the stored value, so a fresh install had
"Player" pre-filled and had to be cleared to begin with.
The stored name is now whatever the user typed, blank included. The
default moved to Settings.displayName, which is what the lobby and seat
labels use, so it applies where a name is shown rather than to what is
being edited. The field keeps its own edit state once touched, and shows
"Player" as placeholder text with a note explaining the fallback.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
Passing was always legal in the first round of bidding, but the buttons
were laid out in a horizontally scrolling row with Pass appended last.
On a phone "Pick it up" and "Pick it up, alone" filled the width, so Pass
sat off the right edge and bidding looked compulsory. The second round
was worse, with up to six suit buttons ahead of it.
The bid options now wrap instead of scrolling, and Pass is lifted out of
that group into its own full-width button underneath, where it cannot be
clipped or scrolled away.
Stick the dealer is the one case where there genuinely is no Pass, so it
now explains itself rather than looking like the same missing button.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
Update channels
- ci.yml now publishes each green push to dev as a prerelease tagged
v1.0.<n>-dev, so the dev channel has something to install. Workflow
artifacts could not serve this: downloading one needs authentication,
which the app does not have.
- Prereleases specifically, because GitHub's "latest release" endpoint
skips them — a production install can never be handed a dev build.
Pull requests build and check but never publish.
- Settings gains a channel picker. The two channels are numbered by
separate workflow run counters, so versions are only compared within a
channel; the app reads the -dev suffix in its own versionName to know
where it stands, and treats a channel change as an explicit switch. The
screen warns that such a switch can be a downgrade Android will refuse.
- PLG_RELEASE becomes PLG_CHANNEL, naming the channel rather than a flag.
Euchre
- Cards in a trick now sit on the side of the table belonging to whoever
played them, rotated to face them, labelled You / Left / Partner /
Right. Previously they were a flat row tagged with seat numbers, which
made it hard to tell who had played what.
- Bidding says what it will actually do. As dealer the button reads "Pick
it up" rather than "Order up", since the turn card comes to your hand,
and a line of explanatory text spells out the consequence either way.
Sequence
- Playable squares get a much heavier outline, scaled off cell size and
in a fixed amber that reads against a white card, a green corner and a
chip alike. The old 2dp theme-coloured border was hard to see.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
Two ways the updater could have served or blocked the wrong build:
- release.yml also triggers on workflow_dispatch, which can be aimed at
any branch from the Actions UI. That would have built dev code and
published it as a real Release, which every install would then offer to
download. The job now refuses to run off anything but main.
- versionCode came from GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER, but that counter is per
workflow, so the dev pipeline had its own independent sequence. A debug
APK installed from a CI artifact already carried a higher versionCode
than the first several releases would, and the updater's check is
latest <= installed, so those users would have been told they were up
to date indefinitely. Only release.yml now sets PLG_RELEASE, and only
that stamps a real version; everything else stays at 1.0.0-dev.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
Lint flagged ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION declared without ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION,
which Android 12 requires to be requested together.
Rather than add the missing one, drop location entirely: the Bluetooth
transport only talks to already-paired devices, enumerating bonded
devices and opening an RFCOMM socket. Neither is a scan, so no location
access is needed. BLUETOOTH_SCAN and BLUETOOTH_ADVERTISE go for the same
reason — nothing was using them.
Discovery of unpaired devices would bring all of these back; the manifest
notes what that would require.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
- Transport.kt used the reified Json.encodeToString extension without
importing kotlinx.serialization.encodeToString, so it resolved to the
two-argument member overload and failed to compile.
- Opt in to ExperimentalMaterial3Api for the clickable game tile.
- Drop --stacktrace from the CI build. A one-line Kotlin error was being
buried under 150 lines of Gradle internals, which made the actual
message hard to find in the log.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
First vertical slice: the whole shell plus two games playable end to end,
so every layer is exercised before the other nine games are built on it.
Games
- Euchre: bowers, ordering up, dealer discard, going alone, stick the
dealer, and full scoring. Rule variants (deck size, points to win,
stick the dealer, going alone) are toggles in game setup.
- Sequence: two-eyed and one-eyed jacks, free corners, locked sequences,
the shared-chip limit, and dead-card exchange. Teams, players per team
and the sequence target are toggles.
- The board layout in SequenceBoard is generated, not the commercial
board — it holds every structural property the rules need, but does not
match a physical board. Documented in docs/RULES-sequence.md.
Multiplayer
- One transport abstraction over newline-delimited JSON, implemented
twice: LAN via NSD discovery and TCP, Bluetooth via Classic RFCOMM.
A lobby advertises on both at once, so a table can mix them.
- Host-authoritative: clients send move intents, the host re-validates
every one against the rules, and each client receives a state redacted
for its own seat so hidden information never crosses the wire.
- Seats start as AI and are handed to people as they join, which is what
makes any mix of humans and AI work without a separate code path.
Shell
- Main menu lists all eleven games; the nine without engines are marked
coming soon and are driven entirely by GameCatalog.
- Settings: sound, animation speed (one multiplier drives card movement
and AI thinking time), and OTA updates from the latest GitHub release.
- Layouts measure available space rather than assuming an orientation.
The game package is free of Android types, so the rules engines and AI
run under plain JUnit; 43 tests cover ranking, following suit, scoring,
sequence detection, redaction, wire round-trips and full random and AI
playthroughs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
Mirrors the Holio setup:
- release.yml: on push to main (e.g. a merged PR), builds the debug APK
and publishes it as a GitHub Release tagged v1.0.<run-number>.
- ci.yml: pre-merge checks on the dev branch and on PRs targeting dev or
main — same build plus unit tests and lint, uploaded as artifacts only.
Both expect a Gradle Android project at the repo root with an :app module,
matching Holio's layout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015qjfMiPUDshdKEUa6vxqzN
Claude