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Duat

Ancient Egyptian board games

Light Me Up Will
Play
  • Category Board games
  • Platforms Web, Android preview
  • Status Live Web + Android Preview
  • Price Free
  • Account Email or Google sign-in

Preview

Duat on a phone
Duat 3D Senet Game Board and AI Arena interface, phone view
Duat House of Thoth Hieroglyphic and Script Learning System, phone view

Duat is an interactive digital museum and cross-platform board game suite celebrating ancient Egyptian culture, mathematics, and mythology. Players experience faithful 3D WebGL recreations of Senet (the game of passing through the underworld), Mehen (the coiled serpent race), Hounds and Jackals (the 58-hole game), Aseb (the 20-square game), and Tâb (the dynamic stick-toss battle). Beyond gameplay, Duat features the "House of Thoth" — an interactive multi-script learning portal for ancient hieroglyphic, Coptic, and Demotic scripts, plus daily historical judgment trivia, archaeological museum links, and cross-game player badges.

Highlights

Faithful 3D Board Game Engines & AI Arena

Implements authentic rules for Senet, Mehen, Hounds & Jackals, Aseb, and Tâb. Features traditional 4-stick throw mechanics with exact binomial probabilities, pawn capturing, safe houses (House of Netjeru, House of Rebirth, Water of Chaos), and minimax-inspired AI opponents.

  • Deterministic game state engines with serializable action history for replay and undo.
  • Custom 3D procedural pawn materials and smooth interpolation along board track coordinates.
  • Pass-and-Play local multiplayer alongside intelligent heuristic bot opponents.

The House of Thoth: Hieroglyphic & Script Deciphering

An interactive historical learning portal enabling users to explore Gardiner list hieroglyphs, transliterations, determinatives, and phonetics across ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Demotic, and ancient Greek scripts.

  • Filterable hieroglyphic dictionary with audio pronunciation cues and glyph breakdown.
  • Daily Judgment quiz system testing knowledge of Egyptian deities, mythology, and papyri.
  • Archaeological artifact viewer linking in-game pieces to real-world artifacts in global museums.

Edge Multiplayer & Cloud Badges

Real-time matchmaking and multiplayer lobbies powered by Cloudflare Workers WebSockets. Player progression unlocks milestone achievements and cross-game badges stored in Cloudflare D1.

  • Low-latency WebSocket game rooms running on Cloudflare global edge network.
  • Unified user progression synced to Cloudflare D1 with dedicated Clerk production JWT verification.
  • Achievements, seasonal milestone titles, and cross-game player badges.

What I built

Solo Creator, Game Engine Architect & Lead Full-Stack Developer

Designed and built the entire application from mathematical rulesets and AI heuristics to WebGL 3D board scenes, cross-platform UI, and edge backend synchronization.

  • Researched archaeological game rules and engineered 5 deterministic game engines (Senet, Mehen, Hounds & Jackals, Aseb, Tâb) with throw-stick probability physics and undo/redo state histories.
  • Developed 3D board environments using Three.js and React Three Fiber with custom lighting, pawn animations, and tactile board interactions.
  • Implemented heuristics-based AI opponents featuring adjustable difficulty levels and distinct strategic personalities for each game.
  • Integrated production Clerk authentication and Cloudflare Workers (lightmeup-api) for cloud profile synchronization, cross-game badges, and real-time multiplayer WebSockets.
  • Shipped responsive web application to Cloudflare Pages (duatplay.com) and prepared Android preview build using Expo SDK 57.

Built with

React 19 / Expo Router TypeScript Three.js / React Three Fiber React Native for Web Cloudflare Workers (lightmeup-api) Cloudflare D1 SQL (lightmeup-db) WebSockets (Edge Rooms) Clerk Auth (Production App)

Duat connects to the shared lightmeup-api Cloudflare Worker using its dedicated production Clerk application, persisting player badges and multiplayer state to Cloudflare D1 (lightmeup-db).

See how the backend fits together

Coming next

  • Peer-to-peer offline Bluetooth matchmaking for mobile devices.
  • Custom WebGL board shader themes (Obsidian, Lapis Lazuli, Gold Leaf, Sandstone).
  • Expanding game catalog to include the ancient Mesopotamian Royal Game of Ur and Roman Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum.
  • Native Google Play Store release for Android devices.

Information

Developer
Light Me Up Will
Category
Board games
Platforms
Web, Android preview
Status
Live Web + Android Preview
Price
Free
Account
Email or Google sign-in
Website
duatplay.com

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