Tue, Sep 15 · 6:00 PM CDT
Bring a standard deck of cards. Phalanx Duel began in July 2022 at a rained-out Scout camp, sketched by hand in a notebook using nothing but a deck from the camp trading post. That analog game is now a full digital engine, built through carefully bounded AI-assisted development: a human architect, agent-driven implementation, and verification gates instead of blind trust in model output.
We’ll start the same way the game itself started: two players, one deck each, learning the rules by playing a hand. Once the room can play, we’ll open the hood. The same rules you just played by hand run as a deterministic server, making every match replayable and independently verifiable. Nothing needs to be installed to follow along; the same server runs on a laptop.
About Mike Hall
Mike Hall is a software engineer based in Chicago, working across production systems, platform reliability, legacy modernization, and observability. Phalanx Duel began as a notebook sketch at a Boy Scout camp in 2022 and is now his hands-on laboratory for deterministic systems and carefully bounded AI-assisted engineering: replayable state transitions, server-authoritative rules, and verification gates that check behavior across a match’s full lifecycle.
More at https://www.just3ws.com/phalanx-duel
