🎲 MoneyMove

A real-time multiplayer property-trading board game for the browser — create a room, share the link, and play with friends or bots. Same genre and flow as richup.io, built from scratch with an original board, art and codebase.

npm install
npm start          # → http://localhost:3000

Open the link, hit Create a private game, copy the room URL and send it to your friends. Anyone with the link joins instantly — no accounts, no installs.

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What's in the game

Board & movement — 4 boards (40 to 48 tiles), two dice with doubles, three doubles sends you to prison, $200 salary for passing START, and a Vacation corner that makes you miss a turn.

Property play — buy streets, airports and utilities; complete a country set to build houses and hotels; mortgage for half price and lift it back for 10% interest. Rent scales with the set, the buildings, how many airports the owner holds, and the dice roll for utilities.

Auctions — skip a purchase and the tile goes under the hammer. Live ascending bids with a countdown that resets on every raise; bots bid too.

Trading — offer any mix of cash, properties and get-out-of-prison cards to any player. Bots evaluate offers and will hunt for the one street they need to finish a set.

Prison — roll a double, pay the $50 fine, or spend a card. Three failed attempts and the fine is forced.

Cards — Treasure and Surprise decks with 18 cards each: payouts, fines, teleports, nearest-airport jumps, per-building repair bills and street collections.

Going broke — when you can't pay, the turn stalls in debt: sell buildings, mortgage streets or trade your way out. Declare bankruptcy and everything transfers to your creditor. Last player standing wins.

Rule toggles — x2 rent on full sets, vacation cash pot, auctions on/off, no rent while the owner is jailed, mortgage on/off, even build, randomized turn order, starting cash from $500 to $5000, and up to 8 players.

Bots — fill empty seats and play a full strategy: buy, build, bid in auctions, hunt for the one street they need via trade, and liquidate when cornered.

Dropped connections — your seat is held for 30 seconds so a refresh or a flaky network never costs you a turn. Only after that does a bot step in, and it hands the seat straight back the moment you return.

Pass-and-play — the 👥 button opens a second window with its own identity, so two people can share one machine. Each seat picks its own name and colour.

How it feels

Tokens hop tile by tile instead of teleporting, and speed up over long rolls. Dice tumble. Cash changes float off the player card in green or red. A banner slides in when the turn passes, the active player's token pulses, and their tile glows gold.

Hovering any street shows its full title deed — every rent step, house cost and mortgage value — and clicking opens the same deed with the build, sell and mortgage buttons for properties you own. Those buttons only appear when the move is actually legal, so you never fire an action just to be told no. Each player card carries colour chips showing how far along each country set they are, so you can read the table at a glance.

Winning drops confetti. Every sound is synthesised in the browser with the Web Audio API — dice, cash, rent, gavel, jail door, victory fanfare — so there isn't a single audio file to download. Toggle it off with the speaker icon.

The whole thing reflows to one column on tablets and phones, and respects prefers-reduced-motion.

Boards

Map	Tiles	Flavour
Classic	40	The original world tour — 8 countries
Mr. Worldwide	48	Bigger board, adds India and Japan, three utilities
Death Valley	40	Canada, Germany, UK and USA go head to head
Bharat	40	A tour of India, Jaipur through to New Delhi
Blitz	28	Short board, two streets per set — games end fast
Lucky Wheel	40	Half the tiles are chance — pure chaos
Random	40	Generated fresh at the start of every game

Random keeps the classic board shape — where the airports, chance tiles and taxes sit — and shuffles the content: eight countries drawn from a pool of fourteen, their cities picked at random, fresh airport and utility names. The price ladder and group sizes stay put, so every generated board is balanced and playable. A new one is rolled the moment the game starts.

The map picker draws a live miniature of each board from its own tile colours, so you can see the shape and the spread of colour sets before you commit to one.

How it fits together

server/
  index.js   Express + Socket.IO: rooms, seats, reconnection, event routing
  game.js    The entire rulebook — one authoritative GameRoom per room
  maps.js    Board data; rent tables and layouts are derived from prices
  cards.js   Treasure and Surprise decks
public/
  js/app.js    identity, landing page, socket wiring, render loop
  js/board.js  tile grid, ownership patching, animated token layer, title deeds
  js/ui.js     player cards, settings, action bar, modals, chat, confetti
  js/sound.js  synthesised sound kit (no audio files)
test/
  smoke.js   map integrity + hundreds of bot games + targeted rule assertions

The server owns every rule. Clients only send intents (roll, buy, bid, …) and render the state that comes back, so a tampered client can't cheat. Identity is a token in localStorage, which means refreshing or losing your connection drops you straight back into your seat — and a bot covers your turns until you're back.

Deploying

This will not run on Vercel, Netlify, or any serverless host. Those platforms answer each request with a short-lived function, and MoneyMove needs the opposite: one process that stays alive to hold WebSocket connections open and keep every room's state in memory. Deploy it there and the landing page loads while every button quietly does nothing, because /socket.io/ has nobody listening.

Use anything that runs a normal Node process:

Host	How
Render	New → Web Service → point at this repo. render.yaml configures it.
Railway	New Project → Deploy from repo. Procfile is picked up automatically.
Fly.io	fly launch — it uses the Dockerfile.
Any VPS	npm ci && npm start, behind nginx with WebSocket upgrade headers proxied.

The server reads PORT from the environment, so nothing else needs configuring. If you put it behind a reverse proxy, make sure the proxy forwards Upgrade and Connection headers, otherwise the socket silently falls back and then fails.

Front end on Vercel, game server elsewhere

You can keep the site on Vercel as long as the game itself runs somewhere that allows a persistent process. Vercel serves public/ as a static site; the browser then talks to the game server directly over WebSocket.

1. Deploy the game server (Render, Railway, Fly — see the table above) and copy its URL, e.g. https://moneymove.onrender.com.
2. Put that URL in public/config.js:

   window.MONEYMOVE_SERVER = 'https://moneymove.onrender.com';
   

3. Deploy the repo to Vercel. vercel.json already sets public/ as the output directory and rewrites /room/:code to index.html; .vercelignore keeps the server code out of the upload.

Leave config.js empty for local development or a single-host deploy — an empty value means "same origin". The Socket.IO browser client is vendored into public/vendor/, so the static host does not need to serve it, and the game server sends Access-Control-Allow-Origin on /api/* for the cross-origin fetches. Refresh the vendored client after upgrading Socket.IO:

cp node_modules/socket.io-client/dist/socket.io.min.js public/vendor/

Testing

npm test

Plays hundreds of bot-only games across every map and rule combination, asserting after every action that nobody holds negative cash, no building sits on an incomplete set, no mortgaged street carries houses, and even-build is never violated. Then it checks specific rules directly: full-set rent doubling, airport rent scaling, the even-build restriction, three-doubles-to-prison, the prison fine, START salary, trade execution and bankruptcy handover.

The same command then runs the feature suites, because a headline feature deserves to be caught by the command everything else is caught by: the bot brain (smart-bots, which plays another three hundred tables to the end and puts a ceiling on what one decision may cost the tick), the quick-match roll, the one-coin board rental, the bots' chat replies, and the coin ledger. Each is a plain node script that prints PASS/FAIL lines and exits non-zero, so any one of them can be run on its own while working on it:

node test/smart-bots.mjs

Two older scripts stay where they have always been, outside npm test, and are worth a run by hand before a release: test/stall-regression.mjs holds a table to the rule that a game with somebody watching never stops, and test/apple-revoke.mjs plays Sign in with Apple end to end against a stand-in for Apple. Neither needs the network or an account.

Notes

Board layouts are data. Add a map by dropping a tile list into RAW_MAPS in server/maps.js — rent tables, house costs, colour groups and the client's grid layout are all derived automatically. Sides can be any length as long as there are four corners.

This is an original implementation of a classic public-domain game genre. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or derived from the assets of any trademark holder.