Pro Libertate Games

A collection of card and board games for Android, playable against the computer or against other people over Wi-Fi (LAN).

What works today

The app shell is complete and every game in the catalogue is playable end to end:

Cards	Euchre, Kaiser, President, Golf, Wizard, Crazy 8s, Cribbage
Board	Sequence, Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, Mastermind, Nine Men's Morris, Pirates and Bulgars, Ta Yü

Nothing is marked Coming soon at the moment, because nothing is waiting. The machinery for it is still there and still tested: a game listed in GameCatalog with available = false appears in the menu marked Coming soon on dev builds only, so a production release lists just what can actually be played and nobody installs it and taps into a dead end. The menu decides this from the installed APK's own version name — the same source the updater uses to know which channel it is on.

Adding a game means writing a GameRules implementation, a GameAi and a screen, then flipping available — the menu, lobby, networking, settings and OTA layers are game-agnostic and need no changes.

Playing with other people

Pick a game, choose Host a game for others to join, and the device advertises itself on the network. Other devices choose Join a game nearby and pick the host from the list. Seats start out filled by the computer and are handed to people as they join, so any mix of humans and AI works — whatever is still marked Computer when the host starts stays AI.

• Wi-Fi (LAN) — both devices must be on the same network. Discovery uses mDNS/NSD; play runs over a TCP socket.

How a match is kept in step

The host is authoritative. Clients send intents ("I would like to play this card") and the host re-validates every one against the rules before it takes effect — a client cannot make an illegal move by sending a malformed message. Each client is then sent a state redacted for its own seat, so opponents' hands and the deck order are never transmitted to devices that should not see them.

Scorekeeper

Scorekeeper on the main menu is a pencil for games the app does not deal — darts, rummy, whatever is actually on the table. It is laid out as the paper it replaces: a column per player with their name at the head, a row per round running down the page, and the running total ruled off at the foot.

     Alice   Bob   Carol
 1     +3     −1      +2
 2     +5     +7       •
 3   [   ] [   ]  [   ]   ← the row being filled in
 Σ      8      6       2

The bottom row is always the one being filled in. Finish it and it is written down, and a fresh empty row opens above the totals for the next round. The totals and that button stay put while the rounds scroll under them, so the tally is never off-screen.

Tap a column head to name it or remove that player; drag it sideways to move the column, and the whole column travels with the name. That works because points are recorded against a player's id rather than their position, so reordering the sheet moves the columns and nothing else. Ids are handed out once and never reused: somebody sitting down where somebody else got up starts at nought instead of inheriting a stranger's score. Removing a player does take their points with them — a score nobody can see is a score nobody can correct.

Rounds are not written in ink. Tapping a round number down the left edge opens that row for correction or lets it be struck out, and the totals follow.

Points are taken away by typing a minus, or with the ± button, which flips the last number typed. Not every keyboard offers a minus on its number pad, and subtracting has to work on all of them.

Sharing a sheet between devices

Tap Share and this phone becomes the host of its sheet; others choose Scorekeeper → Join a shared sheet nearby. Discovery and joining by address work exactly as they do for a game, hotspot included. Nobody is let in on their own say-so: the host gets a prompt with the guest's name and has to Allow or Deny it. A guest who was let in and drops out — a locked phone, say — is let straight back in rather than asked again, and the host can Remove anybody from the Sharing panel.

Everyone on the sheet can add rounds, correct them, rename and move columns. The host's copy is the truth, and what travels is what was done ("add a round with these points"), not whole sheets, so two people entering a round at once get two rounds rather than one overwriting the other. A guest's own change shows immediately and is laid over whatever the host sends until the host confirms it. Sync asks the host for the sheet as it stands, and happens by itself when the app comes back to the front. The host keeps the sheet as its own saved one; a guest's view is not saved, and leaving puts them back on their own sheet. Only the host can start a new game.

The sheet is saved as it is edited, so leaving the app or taking a phone call does not lose the game. It is kept in its own DataStore rather than with the settings, because it is a game in progress rather than a preference.

score/ScoreSheet.kt holds the whole model and, like game/, has no Android in it: every rule above is a pure function and unit-tested on the JVM.

Settings

• Sound on/off.

• Animation speed, 0.5×–2×. One multiplier drives card movement and how long the computer appears to think.

• Updates — check on launch, or check on demand. There is no channel to choose: a build updates from its own channel and no other. A production install is offered production builds from main; a dev install is offered dev builds from dev. The settings screen states which one is running rather than offering a switch.

  The check on launch only ever speaks when there is a build to install. It runs behind the splash and waits for it to clear, and an app that is already current — or a phone that cannot reach GitHub — says nothing, because opening the app was not a question. The button in Settings is a question, so it answers every time, including "you're on the latest" and whatever went wrong.

  Wanting both means installing both — they are separate apps and each updates itself, see Both channels on one device.

Branding

The launcher icon is a single square of the Wallace tartan set on the bias, and the app opens on the same cloth carrying the name in a Celtic uncial hand for two seconds before fading into the menu.

A dev build wears Wallace Hunting instead — the same threadcount with green where the clan sett has red — and installs as Pro Libertate Games DEV. That is what tells the two copies apart when both are on the phone; see Both channels on one device.

The tartan is drawn, not an image: ui/theme/Tartan.kt lays the sett down as warp and then as weft at half opacity, which is what produces the blended squares instead of a flat grid. The icon is the same construction as a vector drawable, so it stays sharp at every density and needs no PNGs.

Two honest caveats:

• The sett is the published threadcount: K/4 R32 K32 Y/4. The slashes are pivots, so WallaceSett holds the half-sett and reflects it out to K4 R32 K32 Y4 K32 R32 — 136 threads, about half black, half red, with a yellow line worth 3%. Two details define the pattern and are easy to get backwards: the yellow overstripe runs down the centre of a wide black band, and the narrow black guard sits between two red blocks. The icon is generated from the same numbers, so the icon and the splash cannot drift. Weave scale is derived from the sett rather than fixed, so changing the threadcount rescales both instead of silently zooming in. The hunting colourway is the same threadcount passed a different field colour, not a second copy of the numbers, so it cannot fall out of step either.
• The typeface is bundled under a licence. Uncial Antiqua, © 2011 Brian J. Bonislawsky DBA Astigmatic, Reserved Font Name "Uncial Antiqua", used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The full licence is at docs/licenses/UncialAntiqua-OFL.txt and must stay with the font — the OFL requires it to be distributed alongside.

Screen sizes

There are no fixed orientations or hard-coded card sizes. Layouts measure the space they are given: the menu grid reflows by width, the Sequence board is always square and sized to fit whatever is left after the hand, and card widths are a fraction of the smaller screen dimension. Rotation is handled inside the activity, so a hand is not lost when the device turns.

The Ta Yü board is the tightest fit of the lot — 18 × 18 cells comes out under 20dp a cell on a phone — which is why laying a tile there is a tap to line the placement up and a button to commit it, rather than a single tap on a target smaller than a fingertip.

Building

./gradlew assembleDebug          # APK at app/build/outputs/apk/debug/
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest      # rules engines and AI

Requires JDK 17 and the Android SDK (compileSdk 34).

A local build is a dev build: it installs as org.prolibertate.games.dev under the name Pro Libertate Games DEV in the hunting sett, so it goes on beside an installed release rather than over it. Set PLG_CHANNEL=production to build the production package instead.

CI

• .github/workflows/ci.yml — builds, tests and lints on dev and on pull requests into dev or main. Its APK artifact is a dev build, versioned <series>.0-dev — the series being whatever plgVersionSeries says in gradle.properties, currently 1.3.
• .github/workflows/release.yml — on push to main, builds the APK and publishes it as a GitHub Release tagged v<series>.<run-number>. The in-app updater reads that tag, which is why the APK's versionCode is the same run number.

Hosting: plg.wallacenet.ca

Both channels are also deployed to one Cloudflare Pages project (plg), served at https://plg.wallacenet.ca:

/                        landing page (reads both latest.json files)
/prod/latest.json        {tag, apkName, apkUrl, channel} — what the updater reads
/prod/ProLibertateGames.apk, /prod/ProLibertateGames-v<series>.<n>.apk
/dev/...                 same, for the dev channel

Each workflow's deploy-pages job runs .github/scripts/stage-pages-site.sh, which stages its own channel and re-fetches the other channel from the live site, because a Pages deploy replaces everything. The two share a concurrency group so they cannot race. Needs repo secrets CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN (Account → Cloudflare Pages → Edit) and CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID. Pages caps files at 25 MiB.

First deploy: the site does not exist yet, so the domain answers 403 (Cloudflare error 1014) and the carry-over fetch would abort. Dispatch the workflow once with first_deploy ticked, then attach plg.wallacenet.ca as a custom domain on the new plg Pages project. Later runs need no input.

The in-app updater reads these latest.json files. GitHub Releases are still published for one transition deployment so installs that predate this change can fetch it; after that, remove the GitHub release steps from both workflows.

Installing without the app

The newest production build is always at https://plg.wallacenet.ca/prod/ProLibertateGames.apk (dev: /dev/ProLibertateGames.apk). The GitHub link below remains during the transition:

https://github.com/adrianoftyriel/ProLibertateGames/releases/latest/download/ProLibertateGames.apk

Every release carries the same APK twice — once named for its version, and once as plain ProLibertateGames.apk, because GitHub's /releases/latest/download/ redirect needs a file name that stays put. The in-app updater deliberately picks the versioned copy, so an installed build can always be traced back to its tag.

There is no equivalent link for the dev channel: /releases/latest skips prereleases by design, and that is exactly what keeps a production install from being handed a dev build. A dev build is reached by the in-app updater of a dev install — which looks at the prerelease list rather than that endpoint — or from the releases page.

The version series

A version is <series>.<run number>. The series is set by hand, once, in gradle.properties:

plgVersionSeries=1.3

Both workflows read that same property when they name a release tag, and the build reads it when it stamps the APK, so the tag and what is inside it cannot name different versions. Bumping a series is a one-line change to that file and nothing else.

The number after it is the CI run number and keeps climbing on its own, which is what makes a series bump safe: versionCode is the run number alone, so going from 1.0 to 1.1 never looks like a downgrade to Android and never interrupts an OTA update. The series is a name for people; the run number is what the machines compare.

Update channels

Both pipelines publish, to two separate channels:

Channel	Published by	Tag	Marked
Production	release.yml, push to main	v<series>.<n>	release
Dev	ci.yml, any build of dev	v<series>.<n>-dev	prerelease

Dev builds are published as prereleases deliberately: GitHub's "latest release" endpoint skips prereleases, so a production-channel install can never be handed a dev build even by accident. Pull requests build and check but never publish, so a PR from a fork cannot ship anything.

Both pipelines gate publishing on the branch rather than on what triggered the build, so a manual run from the Actions tab publishes exactly as a push does — useful when a push cannot fire the workflow itself, which is the case for anything pushed by an automation token. The safety property is unchanged, because publishing still happens only after that same job has built, tested and linted clean. A pull request is still excluded without having to be named: a PR build runs against refs/pull/<n>/merge, never refs/heads/dev.

In ci.yml the PLG_CHANNEL stamp is gated on the same condition as the publish steps, and the two have to stay in step. Stamping a build that then ships, or shipping one that was left unstamped, both end with an APK claiming versionCode 1 — which the updater can never see as an upgrade over anything.

release.yml refuses to run off any branch but main, so a manual dispatch aimed elsewhere does nothing rather than shipping unreviewed code.

The two channels have independent version sequences — a build's versionCode is the run number of the workflow that produced it, and the two workflows count separately. Dev is on 69 while production is on 40, so the numbers say nothing across the divide.

That is why an install only ever updates within its own channel, and why there is no setting for it. The app reads the -dev suffix in its own versionName to know which line it is on, asks only that channel, and refuses anything that comes back belonging to the other one — checked again at the point of decision rather than trusted from the fetch. The rule is a pure function, verdictFor in update/UpdatePolicy.kt, with no Android in it, so it is unit-tested on the JVM like the rules engines are.

Both channels on one device

A dev build installs under its own applicationId, org.prolibertate.games.dev, so it is a separate app as far as Android is concerned and can sit beside the production copy rather than replacing it. Each channel still updates itself normally, because an update within a channel keeps the same package.

Three things move together, all off isDevBuild in app/build.gradle.kts:

	Production	Dev
applicationId	org.prolibertate.games	org.prolibertate.games.dev
Launcher name	Pro Libertate Games	Pro Libertate Games DEV
Sett	Wallace (red)	Wallace Hunting (green)

Anything that is not an explicit PLG_CHANNEL=production build is a dev build, so a local assembleDebug is a dev build too and installs alongside a release without uninstalling anything.

They have to move together. A dev package wearing the production name and colours is precisely the mix-up that having both installed is meant to prevent, which is why one flag drives all three rather than each being set by hand. The name and the colours reach the resources through resValue, so app_name, tartan_field, splash_background and ic_launcher_background are generated by the build and are deliberately not in res/values/ — the icon vectors reference @color/tartan_field rather than a literal, which is how one set of vectors serves both colourways. BuildConfig.DEV_BUILD carries the same flag into Kotlin, where AppSett picks the matching Compose sett for the splash.

Because they are separate apps, having both is a matter of installing both, and each then updates itself down its own line. Nothing in the app moves a phone from one channel to the other: the settings screen states which build is running and where its updates come from, and that is all it does.

The debug keystore is committed on purpose: every build is signed with the same key, so an OTA update installs over the previous one instead of being rejected for a signature mismatch.

Rules

The exact rules implemented, and the options that vary them, are documented per game:

• Euchre
• Sequence — note the caveat about the board layout
• Kaiser
• President
• Golf
• Wizard
• Crazy 8s
• Cribbage — two, three or four, and note that four play in partnerships pegging on one score
• Chess
• Checkers — note the caveat about flying kings
• Backgammon — note that there is no doubling cube
• Mastermind — played as a duel: each player sets the code the other has to break
• Nine Men's Morris
• Pirates and Bulgars — note the caveats about the reconstruction: the book the theme comes from could not be obtained, so the document says which rules are attested and which were chosen
• Ta Yü — note the caveats about the reconstruction: the game is out of print and the rulebook could not be obtained, so the document says which parts are attested and which were derived

Layout

game/          rules engines and AI — pure Kotlin, no Android, unit-tested
  cards/       deck, suits, ranks
  engine/      GameRules / GameAi contracts, seats, table config
  euchre/      Euchre model, rules, AI
  kaiser/      Kaiser model, bidding, rules, AI
  sequence/    Sequence model, board, rules, AI
  president/   President model, rules, AI
  golf/        Golf model, scoring, rules, AI
  wizard/      Wizard model, rules, AI
  crazyeights/ Crazy 8s model, rules, AI
  cribbage/    Cribbage the crib, the play, the show, and a counting AI
  chess/       Chess model, FEN, move generation, search
  morris/      Nine Men's Morris board geometry, mills, rules, search
  checkers/    Checkers board, compulsory captures, crowning, search
  backgammon/  Backgammon points, dice, the maximal-roll rule, turn search
  mastermind/  Mastermind codes, scoring, and a code breaker
  pirates/     Pirates and Bulgars — the cross board, the hunt, search
  tayu/        Ta Yü tile geometry, river rules, scoring, AI
net/           wire protocol, LAN transport, lobby, match driver
score/         scorekeeper sheet — pure Kotlin, unit-tested — and its store
settings/      DataStore-backed preferences
update/        Cloudflare Pages OTA updater, and the channel rule — pure, tested
ui/            Compose screens

Keeping game/ free of Android types is deliberate: the same code drives the AI, the host's authoritative state and the JVM unit tests.