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 nine games are playable end to end:

Playable	Euchre, Kaiser, President, Golf, Wizard, Crazy 8s, Sequence, Chess, Ta Yü
Listed, not yet implemented	Mastermind, Backgammon, Checkers

Unimplemented games appear in the menu marked Coming soon on dev builds only — a production release lists just the games that can actually be played, so nobody installs it and taps into a dead end. The menu decides this from the installed APK's own version name, so it follows the build rather than the channel selected for future updates. Adding one means writing a GameRules implementation, a GameAi, and a screen, then flipping available in GameCatalog — 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, cribbage, 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.

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, from either of two channels:

  • Production — stable builds, published from main.
  • Dev — preview builds, published from dev on every green CI run.

  The two install as separate apps, so both can be kept on one device — 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 1.0.0-dev.
• .github/workflows/release.yml — on push to main, builds the APK and publishes it as a GitHub Release tagged v1.0.<run-number>. The in-app updater reads that tag, which is why the APK's versionCode is the same run number.

Installing without the app

The newest production build is always at this link, which never changes:

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. Dev builds are reached through the in-app updater with the channel set to dev, or from the releases page.

Update channels

Both pipelines publish, to two separate channels:

Channel	Published by	Tag	Marked
Production	release.yml, push to main	v1.0.<n>	release
Dev	ci.yml, any build of dev	v1.0.<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. Versions are therefore only ever compared within a channel; the app reads the -dev suffix in its own versionName to know which channel it is on, and treats a change of channel as an explicit switch rather than an upgrade.

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.

Switching channels in Settings therefore installs the other channel's app alongside this one and leaves this one in place; the settings screen says so when the selected channel is not the installed one.

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
• Chess
• 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
  chess/       Chess model, FEN, move generation, 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/        GitHub Releases OTA updater
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.