sagalbcc

SAGA

The story of your game session — a plain-English word with real Norse roots, picked over the earlier working name (“Tafl”) for being clearer at a glance.

A private browser playtest table for kits made in Kit Forge — the closest practical recreation of Tabletop Simulator for the web: free-form dragging, flipping, rotating, stacking, markers and sticky notes, synced live between players. No rules engine — the table only syncs state (“never say illegal move”). A room is joined by a shared password plus a short code — themed here as a rune (e.g. SAGA-82K) — and everyone at a table is your party.

Built as a game-agnostic sibling of LOL, FIGHT TIEM!’s playtest table — same architecture (Colyseus + React Three Fiber), generalized so any Kit Forge export works, not just one game’s cards. “SAGA” is this table’s own name (chosen for an LBCC Vikings-themed deployment) — Kit Forge itself stays a generic, unbranded tool usable by anyone.

How it fits together

1. Build cards/pieces/boards in Kit Forge (the parent app).
2. Send to Table (Kit Forge’s export button) rasterizes everything and downloads a .kittable.json file.
3. Open this table, create a room, and use 🧰 Table tools → 📦 Load kit… to drop that file in. Everyone at the table sees it appear.

A LOL, FIGHT TIEM! deck from Card Forge loads the same way: use Send to playtest there and drop the .lftdeck.json (each card becomes a poker-size card with its finished art and the card back; a card in several decks of one file spawns once per deck).

1. Physical print-and-play is still available straight from Kit Forge’s own Export ZIP / Print cards — the table and the printable sheets are two independent outputs of the same kit, not a replacement for each other.

Running it locally

npm install
cp .env.example .env   # set TABLE_PASSWORD
npm run dev

Server on http://localhost:2568, client on http://localhost:5195.

Deploying so students can reach it from school computers

This needs a real Node process running somewhere (unlike Kit Forge itself, which is static) — any host that runs long-lived Node + WebSockets works (Render, Fly.io, Railway, a school’s own server). Two things matter for reaching it from a locked-down school network:

• Serve over plain HTTPS on port 443. Websockets riding the same HTTPS port as the page (wss://your-table.example.com) pass through nearly every school firewall/proxy; a raw custom port often does not. All three hosts above give you this by default.
• One URL, no installs. npm run build then npm start serves the built client, the API and the websocket room from the same origin — students just open a link, no separate server address to configure, no software to install (browser-only, same as Kit Forge itself).

Room state is in memory: a server restart ends running tables (mid-game state isn’t persisted yet — see ROADMAP.md). Uploaded images go through a pluggable AssetStorage interface (apps/server/src/storage/); only local disk is implemented today, so a host with a persistent disk (or willingness to lose uploads on redeploy) is what you want for now.

Project layout

Mirrors the pattern in packages/kit-adapter and apps/server/src/table/tableOps.ts: tableOps.ts is the entire “free-form VTT engine” (grab/move/drop/stack/flip/rotate/markers/ notes) as plain, game-agnostic functions over a Colyseus schema — no Kit Forge- or game-specific code in it at all. packages/kit-adapter is the only piece that knows about Kit Forge’s export format; swapping in a different card-maker’s export later would only mean writing a new adapter.