jass.games

Overview

I’ve built a web-based app to play traditional Swiss game Jass, free of charge for anyone to use on their computers, laptops or tablets. Click the picture below for a video in action. The game was playable on jass.games, but I have decided to turn it off again because of low usage.

Details

Every now and then, we like to play a good game of Jass. It is a traditional cards game in Switzerland. There’s probably an uncountable number of variants, but two of the most commonly played flavours are called Coiffeur and Schieber.

During the rather extraordinary situation raised by COVID-19, playing such a game physically was obviously out of question. While on a video call with best friends we usually play this game with, we researched for a potential substitution of physical play. There were a few apps available for smartphones, but either they were not working reliably enough to play a serious game - or they were not designed for players knowing each other beforehands.

I decided to give it a go and build something by myself. Requirements were that it is a web-based solution working on modern browsers, and that it is playable on tablets and computers/laptops.

Technical information stuff

Developed with Node.JS, ReactJS. Most communication happens through websockets using socket.io library.

All graphical assets are self-made, mostly with Inkscape and some GIMP. As a coding IDE, I used Visual Studio Code.

Frontend and backend are running in separate Docker containers hosted on DigitalOcean cloud.