SÉANCE

a haunted parlour game for one house, sixteen phones and three real rooms — this page is also the git repo.

Clone

This site serves the repository over git's dumb-HTTP protocol as plain static files (plain files — there is no git server here, or any server at all):

git clone https://git.ardegazu.ro/game4.git
cd seance

What it is

A party game you play with your feet. Gather 1–16 people in a home, agree which real room is the Study, the Parlour and the Cellar, and open one shared link on every phone. Each time the bell tolls you have ~20 seconds to physically walk to a room and tap it. A ghost sweeps one room — and it favours wherever the crowd stood last bell. Everyone caught loses a candle; lose all three and you fade. Last lit candle wins the séance.

Every bell, one player is secretly the medium: their phone alone names a room the spirit will shun — truthfully. They can share it, keep it, or lie about it out loud. Where you actually stand is the honor system; the walking is the point, not the enforcement. Installable PWA, works from an iOS home screen.

How it works

• No game server. Browsers are js-libp2p peers: they dial a shared circuit-relay-v2 peer over WSS, discover each other through gossipsub, and upgrade to direct WebRTC — the circuit is signaling plus a rate-limited fallback path. The room secret lives in the URL fragment (#…) and never leaves the browser.
• Rooms are cryptographic. Discovery is app-wide, so a room is enforced by a room-scoped protocol id (/seance/2/<HKDF(secret)> — wrong rooms fail protocol negotiation) plus a mutual sealed hello: one AES-256-GCM envelope keyed from the room secret and bound to both noise-authenticated peer ids. After the hello, every pair's frames ride libp2p's noise encryption, end-to-end even when routed through the relay. The p2p layer (client/src/net/) is copied from neon-grid.
• One peer conducts. The lowest peer id runs the bell timers and the ghost's dice, collects secret room picks, and broadcasts tiny phase frames; everyone renders from them. Séances are seat-indexed so guests joining or leaving can't corrupt one in flight. If the conductor's phone dies the séance is voided and the next-lowest id takes over; late joiners get a snapshot and watch from the veil until the next séance.
• Hosting without an origin server. The client is a static Vite build served as plain files — there is no backend anywhere. This page you're reading works the same way.

What's in the repo

Run it yourself

cd client && npm install && npm run dev   # :4173
# open two tabs on the same #room URL and haunt yourself (keys 1/2/3 pick rooms)

Deploy: npm run build, then publish client/dist/ as static files anywhere — IPFS, a CDN, a folder behind nginx. It needs nothing but a signaling relay it's allowed to talk to (see src/game/config.ts).

Guarantees & limits, honestly

• The relay operator sees connection metadata, peer ids, and (until the WebRTC upgrade lands) opaque noise ciphertext and its sizes/timing. Not content, not names, not who the ghost took.
• Anyone with the room link can join and play — capability model. The 16-guest cap is enforced by the conductor (the mesh is O(n²); ~12 is the practical ceiling).
• The conductor is one of the players; a cheating conductor could load the ghost's dice. Between friends that's the same trust as letting someone shuffle the deck. Other players' picks can't be forged.
• Your tapped room is taken on faith — the game can't see your feet. That's a feature: the sprint to the cellar is the game.
• MIT licensed. Built on js-libp2p, WebRTC and WebCrypto.