Short, dated notes about what actually got built. Entries describe
work that is done and verified at the time of writing — this is a log, not a roadmap.
A zero-signup demo exists
Five public-domain classics — tic-tac-toe, connect four (on a compact 5×4 grid),
chomp, nim, and three men's morris — are now playable in the browser against a bot,
with every move validated server-side by the same rules engine that runs everything
else. No account, no email field anywhere in the flow, no third-party analytics; the
only telemetry is a short fixed list of named counters stored on our own server.
What's not done: the demo's public web address isn't live yet, so the "Play the
demo" button on the front page stays disabled until it is.
The engine passed its acid test
The whole premise of Ludira is that game rules are data, not code. The acid test:
define a full economic strategy game — auctions with bidding and passing, a resource
market, score-based turn order, a five-phase round structure — purely as declarative
rules, with zero custom program code, and have the stock engine run it to a real
winner. It does, now, verified by self-play across a dozen random seeds with the
final scoring cross-checked by an independent recomputation from the raw move log.
Getting there wasn't clean on the first pass: adversarial review caught the fuel
economy being quietly decoupled from scoring, and a tie-breaking inequivalence. Both
fixed and re-verified. One disclosed simplification remains (a uniform fuel cost per
city) and is queued as future work, not glossed over.
Ludira has a name and a face
The project (long known by its working repo name) is now Ludira. The name was
confirmed after checking domains and trademark risk, not just picked for sound. The
mark is a "live rule loop": a game-round circle with a teal live segment, a coral
patch segment, and an amber bolt for the moment a rule changes mid-game — which is
the one thing this tool is really about. Display type is Fraunces; the amber cue is
reused across the product as the "a rule just changed, live" signal.
