Gaming
UNC
A turn-based tactical RPG that is played entirely inside a group chat.
UNC is a chat-native tactical RPG with a real rulebook behind it: clans, ranks, skill trees, item economy and a two-turn action-reaction battle cycle where an attack, the defence against it and the counter-attack are three distinct moves.
It grew as a play-by-post game moderated by people, and the moderators became the bottleneck. The backend exists to take the mechanical work off them — validating decks, enforcing cooldowns, resolving randomness and calculating damage — while leaving the human moderators to judge the things that need judgement.
It runs where the players already are. The game is played through WhatsApp messages, with battles held in a supervisor process per match so a long fight keeps its state without holding a connection open.
How it is built
- A two-turn action-reaction battle cycle, so defending is a real move rather than a stat check.
- Battles run as supervised processes, one per match, holding state across a fight that spans hours.
- Automatic deck validation, cooldown enforcement and damage resolution, so moderators only judge edge cases.
- Randomness resolved through several mechanics — rolls, spins and tie-break games — rather than one dice call.
- Played through WhatsApp, with background jobs driving scheduled events and the economy.