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guan-dan

2026

The Chinese card game Guandan, in your terminal — fair shuffle, open rules, written in Rust. Practice against bots or play four-player rooms over WebSocket.

Year
2026
Stack
Rust

掼蛋 (Guandan) is a four-player partnership card game from Huai’an, Jiangsu, hugely popular across the Yangtze delta. guan-dan brings it to the terminal — clean, fair, and open source, the way fight-the-landlord did for 斗地主.

Fair first

  • True random dealing — no card manipulation, no “new-player protection” tricks. Skill and luck, not algorithms and wallets.
  • Transparent rules — the engine and protocol are open source and auditable (MIT).

What’s inside

  • The full core rules — level cards, wild cards (逢人配), the bomb ladder, tribute and anti-tribute, playing up through A.
  • Four players, two teams — classic partnership seating (0+2 vs 1+3).
  • Bot practice — one human plus three heuristic bots.
  • Online rooms — create, join, or quick-match over WebSocket.
  • Bilingual UI — Chinese-first, with English where it matters; dual input via arrow keys or rank shortcuts.

Under the hood

Rust throughout: a pure engine crate with server-authoritative validation, plus separate server and client crates. Install with the one-line script from the README, or cargo run the server and client from source.