gfarena

A browser-based, single-player Go Fish game where one human faces three AI bots. The game engine is written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly via wasm-pack, and served as a single static HTML page — no server required.

Live demo: https://imperialbower.github.io/gfarena/

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How it works

Layer	Technology	Role
Game engine	Rust (gfcore crate)	Go Fish rules, bot AI, game history
WASM bindings	wasm-bindgen	Exposes Rust functions to JavaScript
Frontend	Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS	Card display, status log, bot panels
CI/CD	GitHub Actions	Build WASM → deploy to GitHub Pages

All game state lives in Rust thread_local! singletons. JavaScript calls a small set of exported functions (new_human_vs_bots_game, get_human_state, act, step_bot) and receives JSON back — no state is passed back to Rust from the browser.

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Prerequisites

• Rust (stable, ≥ 1.85) with the wasm32-unknown-unknown target:

  rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
  

• wasm-pack:

  curl https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-pack/installer/init.sh -sSf | sh
  

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Building

# Debug build (fast compile, larger WASM)
make build

# Release build (optimised, smaller WASM — used by CI)
make build-release

# Or invoke wasm-pack directly
wasm-pack build --target web --out-dir www/pkg

The output lands in www/pkg/. Open www/index.html via a local HTTP server (WASM requires HTTPS or localhost):

make serve
# then open http://localhost:8080

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Running tests

End-to-end tests use Playwright against the built WASM.

# Install Node dependencies and Chromium once
make install-playwright

# Build WASM and run all tests
make test

# Interactive UI mode
make test-ui

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Gameplay

• You play as You against three bots: Harriet, Bertram, and Lucky.
• On your turn, click a card in your hand to select a rank, then pick a bot to ask.
• If the bot has cards of that rank they give them to you and you ask again.
• If not, you're told to Go Fish and draw from the pile.
• Each bot's action is shown in the status bar with a 2-second delay so you can follow what they asked for and who they asked.
• Complete a book (all four cards of a rank) and it moves to your books row.
• The player with the most books when the draw pile runs out wins.

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Dependencies

Crate	Purpose
gfcore	Go Fish engine, bot profiles, game history
wasm-bindgen	Rust ↔ JavaScript bridge
serde / serde_json	JSON serialisation of game state
console_error_panic_hook	Rust panics surfaced in the browser console

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License

MIT OR Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-APACHE.