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Kevin 6aa9769ce5 Expand the board to the full sketch (~107 spaces, three forks)

shared/board.js now transcribes every distinct space label from the
hand-drawn sketch (assets/game_board.png) rather than Phase 1's small
subset. The sketch's arrows get genuinely ambiguous in a few places (it
reads as a mockup, not an engineered spec) and reuses several space names
across zones (Start A Business, Family Reunion, Market Crash, ...) — that
repetition is kept as intentional flavor rather than deduplicated, and the
ambiguous bits are resolved into a clean DAG with the same shape Phase 1
proved out: a fork, a chain() per branch, a convergence — repeated three
times (Career/Education/Gap Year, then Relationship/Investment, then High
Risk/Safe), into a long shared retirement tail. Branches are built with a
small chain() helper that auto-wires each entry's `next` to the following
one, since hand-wiring ~107 ids was too error-prone.

The reducer, SQLite schema, and rooms/WS layer needed zero changes — the
whole point of the pure-reducer/graph-data design from Phase 1. Two things
did need generalizing:
- public/boardRender.js's lane offset was hardcoded to a 2-way fork; the
  new "Which Path?" fork is 3-way (Career/Education/Gap Year), so the
  offset formula is now symmetric for any number of branches.
- shared/game.test.js hardcoded Phase 1's specific space ids. Rewritten to
  be board-structure-agnostic: it always resolves the first offered choice
  and otherwise rolls the max die value, which reliably makes progress
  regardless of board shape (walkForward always stops early at the next
  choice/finish), plus a graph-well-formedness check.

Verified: unit tests green; a full two-player game played headlessly
end-to-end through all three forks to Finish in 38 turns with zero
console/page errors; the rendered board visually confirmed at full scale
(5-row snake layout, 3-way fork fans out correctly, all labels legible).

2026-07-21 18:56:27 -07:00

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Life Journey — Phase 1

An async multiplayer, Game-of-Life-style board game. Phase 0 proved the deployment path (Docker → Nginx Proxy Manager → HTTPS → WebSocket). Phase 1 adds the actual game: a pure shared reducer, SQLite persistence, and rooms with shareable invite links, so a few people can play together across devices and tab closes.

The server is the sole authority over game state. It generates the only source of randomness (the dice roll) and applies it through the exact same reducer (shared/game.js) the browser imports — client and server can never disagree about the rules.

What's here

lifegame/
├── docker-compose.yml
├── Dockerfile
├── package.json / package-lock.json
├── shared/
│   ├── board.js          # the Phase 1 board graph + movement helper
│   ├── game.js            # pure reducer: reduce(state, action) -> newState
│   └── game.test.js        # node --test coverage of the whole rules engine
├── server/
│   ├── index.js           # REST + WebSocket, static hosting
│   ├── rooms.js            # in-memory room registry, applies/broadcasts actions
│   ├── db.js               # SQLite schema + data access (games/players/tokens)
│   └── ids.js               # id/token/join-code generation
└── public/
    ├── index.html          # lobby / waiting room / game UI
    ├── client.js            # REST wrappers + NetworkTransport (WebSocket)
    └── boardRender.js        # SVG board, laid out from board.js graph data

Running locally

npm install
npm test          # reducer unit tests — no server needed
npm run dev        # starts on :3000, creates data/lifegame.db on first game

Open two browser tabs at http://localhost:3000. Create a game in one tab, copy the invite link, open it in the other tab, join, and start the game once both players are in the lobby.

The board

shared/board.js (~107 spaces) is transcribed from the hand-drawn sketch at assets/game_board.png, organized into three fork points with the same shape the sketch uses: Career / Education / Gap Year at the start, Relationship / Investment after a shared "quarter-life crisis" chain, then High Risk / Safe before a long shared retirement tail to Finish. The sketch reuses several space names across its zones (Start A Business, Family Reunion, Market Crash, ...) — that's kept as intentional recurring flavor rather than deduplicated. More spaces can be inserted into any branch's chain([...]) array in board.js without touching the reducer, the SVG renderer, or the database schema — none of them know or care how many spaces exist.

Deploying on the homelab

Same as Phase 0 — see homelab-config.md for the full infrastructure reference. Set PUBLIC_URL in .env (or the compose environment) to your public domain so invite links generated by the server are shareable rather than pointing at an internal address:

cd ~/homelab/lifegame
docker compose up -d --build
docker compose logs -f      # expect: "Life Journey (Phase 1) listening on :3000"

Data & backups

The lifegame-data volume (mounted at /app/data) holds lifegame.db — every game, player, and token. Back it up like your other self-hosted data; losing it loses every in-progress and finished game.

What's next

Expand shared/board.js toward the full sketched board
Richer board rendering (the current UI is a functional list view, not the illustrated board)
Tighter reconnection/presence handling (who's online right now, not just who's joined)
Admin page (ADMIN_PASSWORD, already stubbed in .env.example)

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