Allen

Moon of Canadian Fish

Fish Onboarding

Learn the card game Literature in about four minutes, in a scripted teaching game where you have to make the key moves yourself.

At a glance

The first step of the guide, a six-seat table split into Blue and Red teams, your nine cards below it, and the heading "Six players, two teams".
Status
Shipped
When
Aug 2026
Role
Solo: rules engine, teaching script, components, design
Built with
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Vite
  • Vitest
  • CSS

The story

The fastest way to learn Literature is to have someone explain it across a table. This guide competes with that person. It is a scripted teaching game: eight steps, two checkpoints where you have to make the move yourself, and 448 words in total. A longer version lost its testers, so this one is short on purpose, and everything else a table asks about lives on a printable cheat sheet at the end.

Most people reach it by scanning a QR code at the table, so it is phone-first and completely self-contained: no accounts, no backend, no network requests once it has loaded. The whole thing is 82 KB gzipped against a 98 KB budget, with no webfont and no images. (Three.js was measured for this one, and rejected. This website is where it got its revenge.)

Nothing is hand-waved

Every step replays a real game action through the same pure rules engine, starting from a fixed 54-card deal. If the text says “this hits and you keep the turn”, the engine produced that hit, and the tests fail the build if it ever stops doing so. Both checkpoints can be solved by deduction from the public log alone, which is why the deal is hand-authored: a checkpoint you can only guess at teaches guessing.

Colour never carries meaning alone

Team is carried by corner radius, suit by glyph, state by border style. The interface survives greyscale, and that is checked by measurement rather than by eye.