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Head-to-Head Poker

Friday, 29th November 2024

I received an email about a platform for building multiplayer games called Rune, and it intrigued me. Having already started my own multiplayer platform, Kangaroo, but never managing to find the motivation to finish it and polish it up, I was curious what alternatives were out there.

Rune is super easy to use. You can test locally using a dev ui, from which you can add and remove users, simulate different latencies and test spectators. When ready to publish, you simply push to their platform, and once approved, the game becomes available to their users through the Rune app. Rune supports both turn-based and real-time games, although I didn't try making anything real-time.

I do wish I'd added these features to Kangaroo, and if I ever decide to pick it up again, these will certainly be in my mind.

The API itself is really easy to use, and I liked it a lot. There are also a few downsides for me.

• Desktop support. The games are only playable through the mobile app, and there is no desktop support. Given the games are all javascript, it feels there should be the option to play in the browser.
• Cheating. There is no way to have game state available to only one of the players. This means that any private information (such as the cards I have in my hand) is sent to all clients. I'm not really bothered about this, but it's something available in Kangaroo and BoardGameArena. I think for the style of games encouraged on Rune (quick, fun, social games), this isn't that big of a deal.
• Voice chat. The app strongly encourages voice chat, and automatically joins you to a voice channel when you join a room. I find this too intimate!
• Vendor lock-in. The platform itself is not open source (the documentation is, but I'm unsure if that would allow a new implementation of the client API or not), meaning that I am relying on Rune for a game to continue being playable. This is not such a big deal as the Rune API is a very thin layer on top of the game, and it would be easy to swap out for an alternative.

I've already made a few test games on Kangaroo, and so I decided to take one of those and move it over to Rune to try it out. I picked old game we used to play on MSN Messenger called "Seven Hand Poker". Players take it in turns to lay down poker hands. When two hands are opposite each other, the better hand takes a coin. When you have 4 coins total, or 3-in-a-row, you win the game. I renamed it "Head to Head Poker" and uploaded to the platform.

I'm happy with the result, and I hope people will enjoy it! If you want to try it out, it's on Rune.