TESSERA

a quiet race of mosaics — serverless, p2p, end-to-end encrypted

What it is

Up to 16 pilgrims glide across a floating terrace, painting every tile they cross in soft Monument-Valley pastels. Step on a white bloom and a whole patch blossoms in your colour. When the sun sets — 45 seconds — the largest mosaic takes the round; first to 3 rounds keeps the terrace. The edges fold back on themselves: walk off one side, appear on the other.

There is no game server. Your browser and your friends' browsers form an encrypted WebRTC mesh; a blind relay only introduces peers. The invite link carries the room key in the URL fragment, which never leaves your browser. One peer referees the round; if it disappears, the terrace quietly elects a new referee and starts the next sunrise.

This page is also the repository

The site you're reading is a static IPFS snapshot that doubles as a git remote (dumb-HTTP protocol, loose objects):

git clone https://git-game3.ardegazu.ro/tessera.git

Run it yourself

cd tessera/client
npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:5173 — open two tabs on the same #room URL

Honest guarantees & limits

End-to-end encrypted: every frame is AES-GCM sealed per sender; the relay sees only a one-way hash of the room secret.
No accounts, no database, no telemetry. Static files + WebRTC.
Host-authoritative: the referee peer could cheat in its own favour — play with people you like.
Full mesh: rooms allow 16, but a practical ceiling is ~12 simultaneous players (O(n²) connections).
No history: close the last tab and the terrace is gone; the room key in the link is the only state.
If direct connection fails, traffic falls back to an encrypted TURN relay (still unreadable to it).

Anatomy

client/src/lib/ — sueta's p2p core (mesh, crypto, signaling, TURN), vendored unchanged
client/src/game/ — the game: typed wire protocol, seat-indexed host simulation, isometric canvas renderer, pentatonic chimes
deploy/publish-repo.sh — builds this very page + bare mirror