Building SetCardGame: A New Take on Classic Set With Modern Cloud Architecture

Welcome to an in-depth exploration of my project, SetCardGame—a fresh take on a card game, powered by a next-generation serverless architecture.

🃏 The Game: Rules at a Glance

• Objective: Minimize your points.
• Dealing: Each player gets 6 cards, the dealer gets 7 and goes first.
• Card Values:
  • 2–10: face value
  • J/Q/K: 10 points
  • Ace: 1 point
• Sets:
  • Same Number: 3+ cards of any suit
  • Series, Same Suit: 3+ sequential cards of one suit
• Turns:
  • Draw from deck or discard pile (top)
  • Max hand size is 6
• Round End:
  • If your hand is ≤5 points, you may close the round—all reveal cards.
  • Others can make additional sets from revealed cards to reduce points.
• Elimination:
  • Go over 52 points over rounds and you’re out.
  • Last player standing wins.

🏗️ Architecture: Why SetCardGame Is Uniquely Modern

1. Cloud-Enabled, Not Dependent

SetCardGame uses AWS Lambda or an equivalent only as a relay—never as the authority on game state. Clients sync between each other; infra can be swapped or scaled painlessly.

// Pseudocode: Lambda relay handler
exports.handler = async (event) => {
  forwardToRoom(event.roomId, event.message, event.userId);
};
// Each move references prior state hash
type Move = {
  previousHash: string;
  action: string;      // e.g. "draw", "play set"
  player: string;
  payload: object;
  timestamp: number;
};

function makeMove(prevHash, action, player, payload) {
  const move = { previousHash: prevHash, action, player, payload, timestamp: Date.now() };
  move.hash = computeHash(move);
  return move;
}

Clients cross-validate all moves in the log.
3. No Database, No Backend Lock-In

The entire game state is determined from a move log (array of moves). No DB to migrate or maintain—you can switch cloud providers at will.

Client A <-> Relay <-> Client B

4. Sync, Replay, Recovery Baked In

If you drop a connection, simply reload the move log and replay moves to restore the game.

function computeGameStateFromMoves(moves) {
  let state = initGameState();
  for (const move of moves) {
    state = applyMove(state, move);
  }
  return state;
}



5. Elegant Startup: Seeded Deck

Game creator generates a random seed and shares it with all players (in the first move).
Everyone shuffles the deck using the deterministic seed.

// Pseudocode: Creating/reproducing a shuffled deck
function createDeck(seed) {
  const deck = allCards();
  const rng = seededRandom(seed);
  return shuffle(deck, rng);
}