A room holds up to four people and needs two to start. Both numbers are
server constants sent to the client in RoomState, so the lobby draws
whatever the server allows and widening a room is a server change alone.
Failing a turn eliminates that player rather than ending the game. The
syllable and the used words survive them, the turn passes to whoever is
next, and the last player standing wins. Two seats is that same rule seen
from close up, which is why there is one implementation of it and not two.
A dead end still costs the first player to face it their own clock, as
before: they get their turn, and lose it. Everyone behind them has already
seen that board, so they go out together rather than each sitting out a turn
limit they cannot use — which leaves the player who closed the position
standing, the same outcome two players get.
A player who is knocked out keeps their seat. They watch the rest of the
game, chat included, with only the word input gone, and everybody lands back
in the same lobby when it ends. The result screen is the whole table, ranked
by who outlasted whom, with each score reported beside the place rather than
deciding it.
The turn clock is deliberately not paused for a seat that has dropped, so a
player who loses their connection on their own turn loses it the way anybody
else would. Their reconnect window decides only whether they are still in the
game afterwards. Any number of windows can be open at once, settled by one
timer armed for the nearest of them.
Starting waits for every guest, not merely the first: a room of four that
began on one yes would have dealt three people a turn they never agreed to.
Kicking names a seat and is still refused on a player who is ready, and on
the owner's own — leaving is what an owner who wants out does, and it hands
the room on. Joining stays a lobby thing: a room with a game running turns a
latecomer away even with seats going spare, because there is no way to hand
somebody a game already in progress.
BREAKING CHANGE: RoomState, TurnUpdate and GameOver lose the fields that
could only ever describe a second player, OpponentLeft is retired in favour
of presence on RoomState, and suggestions move to the new PlayerEliminated —
they describe the position that beat a player, which by the end of a longer
game is nobody else's position. ProtocolVersion goes to 2, so a client built
against 1 is refused with a readable error rather than decoding a frame that
now means something else.
A room used to be a wrapper around one game: joining started it, and the
room died with it unless both players accepted a rematch inside thirty
seconds. It is now a lobby that outlives its games.
Whoever created the room owns it and the other seat is the guest. The guest
readies and the owner starts; the owner has no readiness of their own,
because starting is the same statement. A finished game returns both to the
lobby, where the next one is agreed exactly as the last was — the readiness
that started a game is spent with it.
A guest takes their readiness back before leaving, which is deliberate
friction: a player the owner is waiting on should have to say so before
walking away. The owner can free the seat of a guest who is not ready, and
not of one who is — readiness is a commitment, not an inconvenience. An
owner who leaves hands the room to whoever is left, unreadied, because they
are the one who starts now.
Something has to bound a room that outlives its games: the last player out
closes it, as does ten minutes in a lobby nobody started a game in. A
dropped connection is still not a player leaving — the seat is held for the
reconnect window in the lobby as well as mid-game, so a refresh no longer
costs somebody their room, and a resume lands in the lobby it left.
The rematch handshake is retired, and RoomCreated and RoomJoined go with it.
All three described part of what RoomState now describes in full, and three
messages for one lobby is three ways for a client to hold a view of it the
server never had. One snapshot per recipient, broadcast from the one place
that knows an input is finished, so no handler can forget to send it.
Create a room and share a six-character code or an invite link; join by either.
The waiting room shows the code until an opponent arrives. During a game the
opponent's disconnection raises a banner with the grace countdown, and their
return clears it. When the game ends, the rematch prompt appears only while an
offer is actually open, so there is never a button that can only produce an
error.
The board is now one component both modes render, which is what makes online
play the same screen as the bot game rather than a second implementation of it.
Room codes are normalized by stripping separators and reading the code out of a
pasted invite link, and nothing else. Filtering out every character outside the
alphabet would turn any sentence into six plausible letters and send the player
to a room that was never theirs.
The socket now opens when the player asks for a room, not on arrival: the
handshake carries the nickname once, and a socket opened before they typed it
introduced them under whatever was stored beforehand. A tab that already holds
a session reconnects immediately instead, so refreshing mid-game returns to the
game. A resume the server cannot honour is dropped quietly rather than opening
the lobby with an error the player did nothing to cause.
The client also notices a socket that fails without closing. Nothing did
before, so the page kept showing a live connection and a running countdown over
a socket nothing could reach. A tick that fired late is ignored, because a
backgrounded tab has its timers throttled and would otherwise close a healthy
connection every time the player switched away.
The board, the home screen and the game-over panel, in Vietnamese, served by
the Go binary as a static single-page app.
The store is a reducer over ServerMessage and computes nothing. Validity, turn
order, scores and the result are read from the wire, which is what lets one
screen serve the bot now and online play later. Every Vietnamese string lives in
one module, including the map from RejectReason to a message, so the server can
send UI keys instead of prose.
The word field is uncontrolled. A Telex or VNI input method composes a diacritic
across several keystrokes, and writing the value back on each one cancels the
composition. It is read on submit and cleared only there.
The countdown is drawn against the server's clock, estimated from the ping round
trip, and settles 300ms early so the ring never claims more time than the server
allows.
The screen owns the socket and the game while it is mounted, and gives the
current game up on the way out. Asking for a game is stored intent rather than a
condition inferred from the board being empty: clearing the board for a rematch
is that same condition, so the inference sent a second StartBotGame and the
server built two rooms that then destroyed each other.
A test greps the built bundle for dictionary words and holds a size budget, so
the wordlist cannot reach the browser unnoticed. Another reads the error codes
out of the Go transport and fails when one has no Vietnamese message.
tiennm99