wwwcats

README

Detonating Cats

A web-based clone of the popular Exploding Kittens card game. I wrote this because I wanted to play the game online with my friends during the December 2020 coronavirus lockdown and was dissatisfied with the existing clones of the game.

Features

This is a pretty much feature-complete clone of the base game. The objective is to permit any play which would be allowed by the rules in a real-life game.

I have done my best to emulate the most important aspects of the game faithfully; while no computer card game is ever 100% true to the experience of the real thing, this version attempts to preserve many of the features of Exploding Kittens which make the game dramatic, dynamic and fun.

The game is fast and lightweight, and can be hosted on any server with no dependencies; all you need is the game server binary and the corresponding static client bundle.

Caveats

• I designed everything myself, including drawing the cards. I have no idea about user interface design, so the whole thing feels a bit early-2000s.
• The game has not been well-tested. I made this for fun, and there are probably bugs. You've been warned!
• If you're interested in improving any aspect of the game, contributions are very welcome. Please open an issue or pull request on GitHub!

Compilation

To compile, you need a recent version of Go – version 1.14 or newer is probably fine. All the other dependencies are fetched automatically.

After cloning the repository:

$ go build
$ # Or, for a statically linked, stripped binary:
$ CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -ldflags "-s -w"

Just run the wwwcats binary to start the server, and ./wwwcats -h for help with more options.

License

Copyright (C) 2021 Lawrence Brown.

"Exploding Kittens" is a trademark of Exploding Kittens Inc.

The program's source code is released under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (version 3). Please see the LICENSE file for more information.