A party game · Live on Cloudflare
Best thy buddies’ bestiary.
A party game of candle-lit auctions and bluffing barters for silly mythical beasts. One screen (a TV or laptop) is the tavern table. Everyone plays on their phone.
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Folio I · Whence it came
idiocy is my version of Kuhhandel, a German card game you might know as You’re Bluffing! Everyone auctions off animals, then haggles for each other’s by sliding face-down money across the table.
The auctions are fun. The haggling is the whole point. Here’s how I put it when I was rebuilding the rules for the medieval version:
…staring down the opposing player in a barter and putting down an undisclosed amount of money on the table. You see how many cards that the other player has laid down, including “bluff” money that makes it look like more, but you don’t really know what the other player is bidding. It’s somewhat intense and always leaves someone feeling a bit silly.
So the brief I gave myself: keep that stare-down, lose the stack of paper money. One big screen is the table everybody watches, Jackbox style. Each phone is a private purse, so nobody can see what you’re about to slide across.
How the game is played · Phase I
Each turn, one player is the auctioneer and turns over the next beast. Everyone else bids from their phone before the candle burns down. Every bid relights it.
When it goes out, the auctioneer has a choice: sell to the high bidder, or pay that same bid out of their own purse and keep the beast. It’s the cruelest button in the game, and it’s labelled Keep it.
Turn up a Golden Goose and she lays an egg first: a coin for every purse, bigger each time. Then, naturally, somebody sells her.
Have a go Thou hast 90 crowns. Wizard Gregor is the auctioneer, and two of thy friends are feeling flush.
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Auctioneer Wizard Gregor
How the game is played · Phase II
Once the last beast is sold, the market closes and bartering stops being optional. On your turn you must challenge a rival over a collection you both hold.
You slide coins across face-down. The big screen shows the pile growing, one coin at a time, so the whole room watches you add one, hesitate, and take it back. Your rival sees how many coins, never how much. They can take the pile, or counter with their own.
Then both piles flip. The richer pile wins the beasts, and the piles swap hands. And everyone starts the game with two brass buttons: worth nothing, but they fatten a pile.
Have a go Lady Grizel holds a unicorn and so dost thou. Tap coins to slide them across, then push.
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The Bestiary
Each collection is worth 50 to 150, and every one has a Peasant, a Squire, a Noble and a Royal. Rank is pure flavour (gilt edges, sillier crowns). Only complete collections score. Tap a card to turn it over.
The Golden Goose lays
The Reckoning Score = sum of thy complete collections × how many thou hast. Dragons and Geese: (140 + 150) × 2 = 580
Joining the table
The TV shows a QR code and a four-letter room code. On your phone you pick a title, type a name (or roll the die for a silly one), and take a seat. Your coat of arms is drawn from your name, so it’s the same on every screen, every game.
Bidiocy
Gather round, ye bidders.
May the best bestiary win.
…and the hat
The narrator promises the winner “a truly enormous hat,” so I had to deliver. After a round, the winner picks one on their phone and it sits on their shield on every screen until somebody else wins and takes the honour. Try a few on.
How it got here
The rules never changed much. The costume changed three times. It started as a joke about NFT collectors, which aged about as well as NFTs did.
Kuhhandel’s rules, re-skinned as NFT trading. Auctions were “The Mint.” Barters were “Sliding into DMs.” The money was Cryptid Coin. It even had a full WebSocket event spec.
I had Gemini make a few pixel portraits as a direction: Bigfoot in shades, Nessie with a pink mohawk, a Chupacabra, a Mothman. Cryptids, because the money was already Cryptid Coin.
Ten collections of four, drawn in code as 12×12 pixel sprites on holographic foil cards. It worked end to end: QR join, live auctions, hidden-bid barters and a podium with confetti.
Then I decided to keep the bones and change the world: a medieval market of mythical creatures, highly polished. Every card was repainted, the music and narration came in, and the rules moved closer to Kuhhandel, not further.
A glossary of things that got renamed
The beasts were people once, too. Goblins and trolls became bonnacons and hydras, and every card was repainted with no clothes or human faces. Still derpy.
Marginalia
Well-thumbed cards
Every card gets scuffs, creases and stains from one shared texture, offset and flipped by a hash of the card’s id, and rests at its own slight tilt. Rank shows in the border: bare paper, silver, gold, then double gold with a foil glint that catches the candlelight.
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Hear the Tale
In the lobby, the host can play a narrated tour. A pretend game plays out on the real table while a spotlight follows the story. The voice is Grandfather Joe, via ElevenLabs.
“…Keeper of the Royal Bestiary! And be given a truly enormous hat.”
Sound
Every bid on the same beast lands a low string stab one note higher than the last. When an auction heats up, a heartbeat drum joins in. It’s capped so it never gets shrill.
Underneath: a tavern hubbub, CC0 crowd oohs and gasps for big overbids and bluffs, and real goose honks.
The name die
Mashed-up surnames, archaic insults, Shakespeare’s clowns, Renaissance instruments, and real historical nicknames. Robert Curthose (“short stockings”) was a Duke of Normandy. Pompey Bum is a real character in Measure for Measure.
Lift to bid
During an auction, lifting your phone upright bids the smallest step you can afford, like raising a paddle. It reads the motion sensors in the browser, and it only adds to the coin buttons, never replaces them.
Head-to-head
An auction needs a rival bidder, so with two players the Crown holds every auction. Both bid, the winner pays the Crown, and those coins leave the game. Purses start doubled. Spend at auction, or save for the barters.
Under the table
A Cloudflare Worker serves the pages, art and audio. Each four-letter table is its own Durable Object holding the game and every phone’s WebSocket. An alarm checks in every five minutes, and a table with no moves for 30 minutes closes itself: the innkeeper sweeps up the cards and blows out the candles.
Socket.io came out so the game could run on Workers. The rules and the table live in one shared module, so my laptop’s Node server and the Worker run exactly the same code.
Scan the QR, pick a title, sit down. Drop out mid-game and you can rejoin with the same name and code.
The rules have unit tests, and a simulator has bots play complete games against a 200×-speed server, two to six players, checking that no coin is created or lost except by the goose.
The 44 beasts, 11 heraldic sigils, 8 hats, the table and the mat were painted with the OpenAI Images API from prompts kept in the repo, so a bad card can be repainted on its own.
Pushes to main deploy through Workers Builds. Pull requests get their own preview table with a short
three-collection deck.
The stack
The table is open
Bidiocy is live. Open Host the Table on a TV or laptop, then have everyone scan the QR code with their phone. The table seats two to six.
Play it