mino.mobi · fable · deal

deal.

Card games no one wrote — opponents included. Each page rolls a two-player card game from a genome (deck, legality, trumps, poisons, wilds), and a tribunal of simulated opponents plays it hundreds of times before you arrive: the game ships only with measured proof that it terminates, rewards skill (the smart bot beats the random one — your decisions will matter), and plays fair (no crushing first-seat edge). Then you sit down against the bot that certified it.
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Game over
the bot
your hand — click a card to play
how this game works
pages 1–12

A new oracle family: the tribunal

deal is the eighth wing of fable, and it breaks two assumptions at once: hidden information (hands you can't see) and an adversary. That kills the BFS oracle — there is no "the answer" when someone is playing back at you. So certification changes shape. Instead of solving the game, a tribunal of simulated opponents plays each candidate hundreds of times (seeded, reproducible) and the game ships only if three gates pass with measured evidence:

  • Terminates — every probe game ends. No infinite stalemates.
  • Rewards skill — a heuristic bot beats a random bot by a real margin. This is the deep one: it is quantified proof that the game's decisions matter. A coin-flip game fails this gate, and most raw genomes do — roughly two-thirds are rejected here.
  • Plays fair — bot-vs-bot shows no crushing first-seat advantage and a tolerable draw rate.

Interest is graded from the same evidence: skill depth, tension (how often the lead changes hands), agency (real choices per turn), pace. The verdict panel shows the actual numbers from this game's tribunal.

The genome

Two structural families with a sampled deck (3–4 suits × 6–9 ranks), and family-specific grammar: trick-taking (follow-suit or free, optional trump suit, scored by tricks, captured points, or hearts-style avoidance) and shedding (match by suit/rank, climbing, wild ranks, skip ranks). Familiar games fall out as special cases; most rolls have no family name. The rulebook is generated from the genome — the rules card writes itself.

The opponent is the point

The greedy bot that certifies each game is the same bot you play. It knows the objective (ducks poison in avoidance games, holds wilds, chains skips when ahead) but searches nothing — strong enough that beating it feels earned, weak enough that you can. "Watch bot vs bot" replays a certification game so you can learn the game by watching its first two players.

Multiplayer is one room away

The engine is a pure reducer: init(genome, seed), legalMoves(state), apply(state, move). No mutation, no hidden randomness. That is exactly the contract the games.mino.mobi party platform (Durable Object rooms), hoop, and the ar/mmo transports already speak — a remote human is just another move source. The bot is the first opponent, not the last.