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Building a multiplayer card game taught me to treat the server as the authority on game rules, model interruptions as part of the game, and give each player only the information they are allowed to see. In his account of building Dealopoly, a real-time platform for games including Monodeal and Lowdeck, Shubham Saurabh describes how those choices shaped the game engine, network handling, storage, and debugging.
These are lessons from one project, not a universal architecture or an independent assessment of its security or performance. They are useful starting points for anyone designing a game in which players share state over an unreliable network.
Make the server decide whether a move is legal
A multiplayer client is not a trustworthy place to enforce the rules. A player can modify their browser, and a client may also be acting on stale information. In Dealopoly, the browser sends a requested action; the server checks whether it is legal, applies the game rules, and sends the resulting state to players.
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Think in commands and outcomes
A useful way to frame the interaction is as a command flow:
- The client submits an action it wants to take.
- The server validates the action against the current state and rules.
- The game engine rejects it or applies it and produces updated state and events.
- The server distributes the appropriate result to each player.
This makes the server’s decision—not a client-side animation or assertion—the authoritative game outcome.
Keep the rules engine separate from the network layer
Saurabh describes separating Dealopoly’s deterministic game engine from its Fastify WebSocket server. The engine receives a state and a command, then returns a rejection or an updated state and events. That separation lets rule behavior be exercised without starting a browser, WebSocket server, Redis, or database.
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For a game developer, the practical benefit is a smaller test surface: rules can be tested as rules rather than only through an end-to-end session. It also keeps transport concerns—how commands arrive and updates are sent—from becoming entangled with what a move means.
Represent rules as explicit parts of the game
The account describes distinct rule modules for setup, drawing, property, rent, payment, reactions, and win conditions. The point is not that every game needs precisely those modules; it is that rules become easier to reason about when their responsibilities and transitions are explicit rather than buried in a large network handler.
Model reactions and interruptions as real game states
Some actions are not resolved in one uninterrupted step. A move may open a response window, be countered, or continue to final resolution. Dealopoly’s account treats reactions as a state machine, making the intermediate window part of the game rather than an incidental pause in the interface.
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This is important because the game must know what is currently allowed: who may respond, what responses are valid, and what happens when the window closes. The same principle applies to other interruptions, including a player disconnecting while a turn is in progress.
Send each player a view they are allowed to see
The complete server state may include hidden information, such as other players’ hands. Broadcasting that full state and relying on the client to hide sensitive details would expose information to anyone able to inspect the client’s data.
Instead, the account describes generating a player-specific masked view. The underlying state can be the same while the representation sent to each player differs. This makes information access a server-side decision and lets the game preserve secrecy by design.
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Design disconnects and reconnects as game behavior
A dropped connection changes what the game can do next. Dealopoly tracks room membership and disconnect state, then allows a grace period before replacing a disconnected player with a bot. That makes reconnection policy part of the product’s rules: the game has to decide how long to wait and what happens if the player does not return.
Rather than treating a disconnect as only a UI error, define the relevant transitions explicitly. For example, the system needs to distinguish a connected player from a disconnected player who may still reclaim their seat, and from a player whose grace period has expired. The precise policy depends on the game; the account does not establish a universally appropriate timeout.
Give short-lived coordination and durable records different jobs
Saurabh reports using Redis for realtime room coordination, including room state, active-room indexing, disconnect timers, and Pub/Sub between server instances. He describes PostgreSQL as the separate store for longer-lived player records, game history, statistics, and leaderboards.
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The underlying design question is how long each kind of information must live and whether it needs to coordinate across server instances. A turn or room coordination detail may have different durability needs from a player record or completed-game history. The account offers one project’s division of responsibilities, not a prescription that every multiplayer game must use these particular technologies.
Use bots and simulations to exercise the same rules
Dealopoly’s bots send legal commands through the same game engine as human players. This keeps bot behavior subject to the game’s rule checks rather than giving it a separate route that can bypass them.
The author also recommends simulations with deterministic seeds. A seed can make a generated sequence repeatable, helping a developer reproduce a failure and inspect the state transitions that led to it. Simulations can also help expose long sequences that result in impossible states. They are a debugging aid, not a guarantee that every defect or edge case will be found.
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What to take from this project
The strongest lesson is to make the game’s boundaries explicit: who can authorize a move, which component owns the rules, what each player can see, and how the game changes when a response window or network interruption occurs. The Dealopoly account shows one way to organize those decisions across an engine, WebSocket server, Redis coordination, and persistent storage. Its value is as a concrete engineering example, not proof that this particular stack or design is best for every game.
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