dominoes/README.md

Dominoes

All Fives with a double-six set, in the browser: four at the table, five tiles each and a boneyard, first to 250. One human against three computer players, old men and young ones, every one of whom has something to say about your play.

The table

All Fives, the way it is played on a card table. The rules are spelled out on the landing page before anyone plays, and they follow pagat's All Fives with one table's worth of house rules:

• five tiles each and eight in the boneyard; a player who cannot match draws, one tile at a time, and knocks only when the boneyard is empty;
• the highest double dealt opens the first hand; after that the winner of the last hand leads anything;
• the first double down is the spinner, marked with a star, and once both its sides are covered its top and bottom open, so the line runs four ways;
• after every tile the open ends are added up -- a double on an end counts both halves, and the spinner counts both halves until both its sides are covered -- and a multiple of five scores on the spot;
• going out, or the lowest count in a blocked hand, scores the pips left in the other hands to the nearest five;
• first to 250 wins, the moment they reach it, even in the middle of a hand.

The score sheet is kept the way it is at the table: a stroke for every five, the fifth a slash through the four, so a box is twenty-five.

No hints. Nothing lights up to say which tiles fit or what a play would score. You drag a tile to an end, or tap it and tap the end, and if it does not match it comes back.

The layout

src/game/layout.ts. The line is drawn from a hub -- the spinner once there is one, otherwise the first tile -- so the spinner always sits in the middle of the felt. Each arm turns its corners the same way round, like a pinwheel, and each leg may run further than the last, so four arms wind outward without meeting. layout.test.ts lays the table after every tile of hundreds of hands at four widths and holds it to no tile on another and no tile floating free.

The bots

src/game/bot.ts. A bot knows what a careful player knows: its own tiles, the table, how many each player holds, and which numbers each has knocked on. It never looks at another hand. It prices each legal move -- points on the board now first, then shedding weight, getting doubles down, keeping a hand it can play, and leaving the next man stuck -- and plays the dearest. It blocks a hand only when it is certain to hold the lowest count.

In tests a bot beats three players who always lay their heaviest tile, and four bots win evenly from every seat.

The talk

src/game/talk.ts. Every play gets a line from somebody, in a speech bubble off the side of his seat: the man who played it, or whoever has an opinion. It reads only what the table can see, so it never gives away a hand.

The sound

The synth is the one the site's other games share. What is written for this one is the table: a tile slammed onto an old folding card table (the crack, the thin top booming, the loose legs rattling), knuckles for a knock, a pencil stroke for every five on the sheet. The shuffle is a real recording, public domain (CC0) from Freesound and credited in NOTICE.md, with a synthesized stand-in if it cannot be loaded. The music is a loop in the son idiom: clave, tumbao, piano on the off-beats.

Where it lives

https://games.jcoffey.dev/dominoes/, built straight from this repository's main. This is AGPL, and section 13 asks that players be offered the source of the version they are running. Building from the published ref is what makes that offer true.

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:5173
npm test
npm run build