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.