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Rules, safety, and provenance

How to play Cards Against Equestria

This implementation follows the core 2016 server rules while fixing its known submission, privacy, deck-exhaustion, and moderation bugs.

1

Set up the table

  1. Seat at least three players. The host chooses a score target, player cap, and one or more packs.
  2. Every player receives ten white response cards. The server rejects deck combinations too small for the seated table.
  3. The first Card Czar is random. After each round, the role moves to the next seated player.
2

Play a round

  1. A black prompt appears. Its Pick number says exactly how many responses each non-Czar player submits.
  2. Choose cards in the order they should fill the blanks. You may withdraw while other players are still choosing.
  3. Once everyone submits, the server shuffles and reveals the responses without names or player IDs.
  4. The Card Czar chooses the funniest response. Only then are authors revealed and the winner gains one point.
  5. The Czar or host starts the next round. Used cards enter discard piles and are safely reshuffled when a draw pile runs out.
3

Win the game

The first player to the room's score target wins. Finished rooms remain readable until the owner closes them; closed rooms remain available to their participants as read-only archives.

4

Keep the table playable

  • The owner may appoint accepted players as room moderators.
  • Owners and room moderators may hide or restore chat, kick players, and issue room bans. Actions are audited.
  • Global moderators and administrators may moderate any room and issue game-wide or site-wide live multiplayer bans.
  • A ban immediately evicts matching live sockets. If a player is removed mid-game, the current round is safely discarded and restarted with the remaining table.
  • Room moderators cannot ban site staff or remove the owner; global staff hierarchy still applies.
Archive

What changed from the old site

The defunct server stored games and chat only in process memory, used long polling, trusted several invalid moves, and had no message moderation. This version uses persistent revisioned room state, idempotent operations, per-viewer state redaction, live Socket.IO updates, reconnect recovery, archived rooms, and an explicit phase machine.

The modern table locks its playing roster when the host deals and uses manual Czar/host round progression instead of the legacy site's optional round timer and mid-game joins. The old lobby also advertised eight house rules, but its source marked every one as unimplemented; they are not presented as working rules here.

Attribution

Cards and trademarks

The 23 legacy JSON decks are reproduced from Rylius/CardsAgainstEquestria at commit 78c14b5. Its license page identifies Cards Against Equestria and historical Cards Against Humanity material as CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, and modified Pretend You're Xyzzy material as CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Cards Against Humanity is a trademark of Cards Against Humanity LLC. My Little Pony and related marks belong to their respective owners. None of those parties endorses this unofficial implementation.