Oh Hell Card Game

This project started the way a lot of good side projects do: out of frustration during a weekly Friday night ritual. My friends and I had been playing an existing digital version of the classic card game Oh Hell during our online game nights, but it kept getting in the way of the fun — players would randomly disconnect and derail the whole match, and the bots played so unfairly that they threw off the balance of the game. Rather than keep tolerating it, I decided to build my own version that actually solved those problems. I had a working prototype up in just four hours, and play-tested it live with my friends that same night, then spent the following week's nights iterating: refining the graphics, dialing in mobile and PC compatibility, tightening the rule implementation, and rebuilding the bot logic so bots would mimic realistic human play patterns instead of playing predictably or unfairly. The standout feature of that bot system is seamless disconnect handling — if a player drops, a bot instantly steps in and plays their hand in a human-like way so the game never stalls, and when that player reconnects, they smoothly resume control right where the bot left off. Under the hood, the entire game is built with Node.js and Socket.IO for real-time, low-latency multiplayer communication, paired with vanilla JavaScript on the frontend, and it's deployed on live servers so friends anywhere in the world can join with solid connectivity. On top of the core gameplay, I built out a full scorecard system that tracks points per round, calculates running totals, and crowns a trophy winner at the end, along with private host rooms accessible via a secret join code, custom display names, and selectable profile icons for a bit of personality. What started as a single weekend fix for a game night annoyance turned into a fully deployed, actively used multiplayer game across all my friend groups.