A /rules page says, in one place, what nothing in the app said before:
the chain rule, the clock, what a dead end costs, elimination and the last
player standing, how a word is scored and the reconnect window. Linked
from the landing page and from the board and lobby headers.
The chat control moves above the chain as a pill with the unread count,
where it can be reached on a phone mid-game, and the lobby's folded chat
now carries an unread badge too.
ESLint with the Svelte and JSDoc plugins, run in CI; the real findings
it turned up (missing each keys, untyped timer handles) are fixed.
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.
Three things a player asked for after playing:
The field now arrives holding the syllable the next word has to start with,
so only the half that is still in question gets typed. It is written once per
turn and never over an existing draft, which keeps the field uncontrolled and
leaves Telex and VNI composition alone.
The chain lists the newest word first. The move that decides what to play
next is the last one, and it belongs where the eye lands rather than at the
end of a list that has to be scrolled.
A finished game can be downloaded as a plain-text transcript: the chain in
playing order, who played each word, and the final score. The export keeps
playing order because a chain read on its own only makes sense from the
opening word forward — newest-first is a reading aid for the live board, not
the shape of the game.
tiennm99