GameHub

Party games for people sitting at the same table. Most of them are played on a single phone, passed around (pass-and-play); Quiplash is played on everybody's phone at once, in a room they join with a four-letter code. No accounts, runs entirely in the browser, and works offline as an installable PWA (Quiplash's rooms are the one thing that needs a network).

Games included:

• Mister White: find the impostors among you before they blend in.
• Heads Up: in teams. Hold the phone to your forehead and guess the word from your team's clues.
• Quiplash: two people answer the same prompt, everybody else votes for the funnier one.

The interface is available in Italian and English.

Play it at https://edoconfo.github.io/GameHub/

Requirements

• Node.js 18+ (tested with Node 20 and 24)

Local development

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173/GameHub/ (the port is fixed).

Production build

npm run build      # output in dist/
npm run preview    # preview the build

Icons

The PWA icons are already generated in public/icons/. To regenerate them:

npm run icons

They are created by a plain Node script (scripts/gen-icons.mjs) with no dependencies.

Deploying to GitHub Pages

Every push to main is deployed automatically by GitHub Actions.

1. Open the repository's Settings → Pages.
2. Under Build and deployment → Source, choose GitHub Actions.
3. Push to main: the .github/workflows/deploy.yml workflow builds and publishes the site.
4. The site is served at https://<user>.github.io/GameHub/.

Base path

The app is served from a subfolder (the repository name), so vite.config.js sets:

const BASE = '/GameHub/'

If you rename the repository, change BASE to /<new-name>/ (keep the leading and trailing slashes).

Installing as an app

1. Open the site in your phone's browser.
2. Browser menu → Add to Home screen (Android/Chrome), or Share → Add to Home Screen (iOS/Safari).
3. After the first visit it works without a network: the service worker caches the app, and the words are kept on the phone once downloaded.

When a new version is deployed, the app notices and offers to update.

Word packs

Word packs are per game: each game has its own packs, in its own format and storage. The global settings only handle theme, language and players.

To manage them, open a game → Manage words. There you can switch packs on and off, create your own (saved in the browser's localStorage) and edit or delete them.

A pack holds one list per language, side by side. A pack without the current language is hidden.

No game ships its words. They all live in a Supabase database (schema in supabase/): the app only reads them, downloads them the first time it sees a network, keeps them on the phone in IndexedDB so they play offline, and offers to update them when the database copy changes. The public key in src/shared/supabase.js is read-only by design — the database's own rules allow it nothing else.

Until that first download there is nothing to play with, and the game says so instead of showing an empty list.

The built-in packs are played but not opened: their words stay out of sight, so nobody at the table has read them first. Packs you write yourself are yours to edit, and sit beside them.

Mister White: pairs

Each item is a pair: the Civilians' word and a similar word for the Undercovers. There is one built-in pack, Base, in the mw_base table.

It used to be five themed packs. Picking one told the table what the word was about, which hands Mister White — the one player without a word — most of the answer. A pool with no theme gives nothing away.

Heads Up: single words

Each item is one word (or name, or phrase), and the built-in packs are the categories: Animali, Cibo & Bevande, Film & Serie, VIP & Personaggi, Da mimare. They live in two tables, hu_packs (the categories and their names) and hu_words (the words in them).

The categories stay, where Mister White's themes went away, because here the category is the game: you pick "Animali" and everyone knows it.

In both tables one row carries every language at once, and no column may be empty — so a pair or a word exists in all languages or in none, and every language plays the same list, with the same count.

Quiplash: prompts

Each item is one prompt — "The worst name for a cat" — and there is one built-in pack, Base, in the ql_prompts table. Like Mister White's Base it is played but not opened: a prompt read beforehand is a prompt somebody has already written the answer to.

How it works

The shared logic (storage, enabling, custom packs, languages) lives in src/shared/packStore.js: a createPackStore factory that each game instantiates with its own namespace and a codec describing the shape of its items. The editor UI (src/shared/packEditor.js) is shared, but it is opened from inside each game, not from the settings.

Adding a new game

Each game is a self-contained module. The rest of the app (hub, router, settings) knows nothing about it.

1. Create src/games/<id>/index.js with a default export (the game contract):

   export default {
     id: 'my-game',
     name: 'My Game',
     description: 'One line for the hub card.',
     icon: '🎲',
     glyph: 'words',
     menu: [{ title: 'Play', sub: '', phase: 'play', glyph: 'play' }],
     mount(container, ctx, phase) {
       // ctx = { storage, players, table, stats, router, root, applyTheme }
       // render into container; return a cleanup function if needed
       // (called when leaving the game: stop timers and sensors)
     }
   }

   The full contract, including the optional shared table, is documented in src/games/registry.js.

2. Register it in src/games/registry.js:

   import myGame from './my-game/index.js'
   export const games = [misterWhite, headsUp, myGame]

That's it: the game shows up in the hub and #/my-game works.

Project structure

src/
  main.js              boot + routes
  router.js            hash router (#/, #/<game>, #/<game>/<phase>, #/players, #/settings)
  styles.css           theme tokens + shared UI
  shared/              storage, i18n, players, table, pack store + editor, PWA update, Supabase client
  hub/                 home, players, shared table scene
  games/
    registry.js        list of games
    mister-white/      engine + match + packs.js (Base from Supabase)
    heads-up/          match (teams, turns) + screens + motion + teams.js + packs.js
    quiplash/          round.js (the arithmetic) + game.js (a match, as the room
                       holds it) + room.js / guest.js (several phones) +
                       match.js (one phone) + screens.js + packs.js
supabase/              database schema for the remote packs

Quiplash across several phones

Quiplash is the one game here that is better on more than one device: writing is private and simultaneous, which a single phone can only imitate by taking turns. So it has a room.

• One phone opens it (Gioca) and gets a four-letter code. That phone holds the match: it decides what is going on and tells the others. It is also the screen — the table, the prompt, the two answers — so a tablet in the middle of the table plays like Quiplash always has.
• The others open GameHub → Quiplash → Entra, type the code and pick their profile. They write and vote on their own phone, and they see the whole match as well, so a room with no screen in the middle works just as well. The phone that opened the room can hold a player of its own (Gioco anch'io).
• With no network, or with one phone only, Un telefono solo plays the same game pass-and-play: the phone goes round for the answers, and the table votes by tapping the seats.

The wire is src/shared/realtime.js: Supabase Realtime in broadcast mode. Messages go phone → Supabase → phones and are never written down — no table, no rows to clean up, and the public key still cannot read or change a single row of the database. Broadcast and not the database's own change feed, because a party game is judged on how fast it answers.

The room is as private as its code: anybody who knows it can join, and everything the room says is readable by anyone in it who opens a browser console. It is a game among friends, not a bank.

How to play Heads Up

• Sit everyone at the table and split them into teams — the seat colour says who plays with whom. A team needs at least two players: one holds the phone, the others give the clues.
• A turn is one team's: the phone goes to one of them, on the forehead with the screen facing out, and the rest shout clues until the time runs out. Tilt down for a right answer, up to pass — or tap the screen, right and left.
• When every team has had its turn the standings come up, with Play again right there. One turn each by default; two or three in the drawer if you want a longer game.
• The phone rotates inside the team from turn to turn, so it is never always the same person holding it.

How to play Quiplash

• Everybody gets two prompts, and every prompt goes to two people: in a room they write at the same time on their own phone, on a single phone it goes round.
• Then the two answers come up side by side, with no names on them, and everybody else votes for the funnier one. The two who wrote don't vote — in a room nobody even knows who they are until the vote is in.
• Every vote is worth 100 points. An answer that takes every vote is a Quiplash and is worth double.
• A round is one prompt per player. The second round is worth double and the third triple, so it can all turn around on the last prompt.

How to play Mister White

• Civilians get the secret word.
• Undercovers get a similar but different word.
• Mister White gets no word at all and has to bluff.
• In turn, everyone says one word related to their own. Then the group votes someone out.
• Civilians win by unmasking every impostor; the impostors win by surviving. Mister White, once voted out, can still win by guessing the Civilians' word.

License

MIT