Games


Dec. 15, 2025

Christmas Decorations Online

Ho Ho Ho! It’s Christmas on CoD4!

It’s Christmas time again, and so the better sort of private servers are running Christmas variations of their popular map rotations. This is mostly always a fan effort but occassionally official creators will get involved and delivery us gems like Winter Crash, an enduring classic.

Digital decoration is a tradition I hope never breaks. For this site’s festive bulbs we’re using the wonderful Christmas-Lights.js by Bradly Feeley.

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Jul. 5, 2024

Analogue Correspondence Card Games

To play a card game like poker by correspondence would require the decks to be exactly the same sequence in both locations similar to correspondence chess where the boards must be exactly the same states in both locations. (For simplicity I am speaking on the assumption of two players, but for n players the rule remains.)

However unlike chess where the players can openly see the state of the board, the players in a card game like poker must be unaware of the state of the deck. This makes things trickier, and so both players must perform a shared seeded blind shuffle of their decks, the goal being to have both shuffle their decks fairly but result in the same unknown sequences.

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Jul. 4, 2024

Correspondence Poker by Seeded Random

I enjoy correspondence chess, plaintext computing, stateless APIs and Jamstack, and I also enjoy poker; so a while back I created a means of playing poker by correspondence via linked webpages: Plaintext-Poker (repo).

This utilises a seeded random (actually Java’s Random ported to Javascript!) to ensure that players stay on the same deck and same game state without any memory being used anywhere. It does this in a stateless fashion by using the seed to perform the exact same previous actions for each stage, given the seed via the URL, with a player number, the number of players and the game stage also included.

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Mar. 17, 2024

Making Mount & Blade: Warband, Halal

It’s always irked me somewhat that the townships of the Sarranid Sultanate in Mount & Blade: Warband carry pork products. The faction is obviously very Islamic themed, minarets are visible & their banner features a crescent moon. So, despite M&B never explicitly mentioning religion, such an Islamic themed faction should not be anywhere near pork.

But, this glaring anatopism is fixable with some very light-touch modding.

By editing the item_kinds1.txt within the games Modules folder, we can find the item definitions for itm_pork & itm_sausages.

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Dec. 11, 2023

Substituting Games Workshop Scatter & Artillery Dice with a Standard D10

Here’s a system to use a single D10 dice (the kind that “points” a direction when at rest) as substitute for a set of Games Workshop (GW) Scatter & Artillery Dice (the kind used for Warhammer Fantasy 5th Ed.). This system is long-winded, daft and best ignored. If you need to substitute some lost Scatter & Artillery Dice, just use regular D6s.

To begin let us lay out possible results of the two proprietary GW dice, each dice has 6 faces.

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