carterbox

A party-game platform in the Jackbox mould. The host puts a room on the TV, everyone joins from their phone with a four-letter code, and one server runs five games behind the same lobby. Each game is a pure state machine that never touches a socket; the runner around it decides who is connected, what time it is and which screen may see what. Refresh a phone mid-game and it takes its seat back. Kill one and the room stops waiting for it.

The games

• A drawing bluff. Everyone draws a secret prompt, writes fake titles for each other's drawings, then hunts for the real one among the lies.
• JIGGLE! Each player is a googly-eyed jello letter on the TV, wobbling as hard as their phone is really shaking, through rounds of shake it, freeze, and match a moving band.
• STAMPEDE! Underpaid customs officers stamp absurd luggage against a rule that gets worse by the shift. A wrong stamp costs double, so mashing loses. On the night shift one officer is secretly the Smuggler, and the shift ends in an accusation.
• TWIDDLER. A rhythm game for fingertips. The phone is only a touchpad and every eye stays on the TV, where a song calls for taps, swipes, circles, pinches and stars, graded on timing, shape, tempo and flow.
• TIMELINE. A song plays and the phones guess its decade, then its year, and the reveal brings the release date, the artwork and a paragraph from Wikipedia. The songs come from a curated deck or, with Spotify, the host's own playlists. A looked-up date only counts when its year agrees with the deck, because store catalogs date old songs by their reissues.

Secrets and clocks

Secrets are addressed, not broadcast. A drawing prompt reaches only its artist. TIMELINE runs the other way: the audio cue names the song, so it goes only to the TV, and no phone learns the answer before the reveal.

Rhythm runs on the server's clock. TWIDDLER's phones stamp each finger sample with when it moved, using an offset learned from clock-sync round trips, so network jitter cannot cost a beat. The server believes a stamp up to half a second old, and the judge runs 120 ms behind the clock so a touch has time to arrive before its note is called a miss.

Silence scores worst, not best: a phone that sends nothing in JIGGLE! counts as maximum wobble, so a handset left face-down cannot win the round where you hold still.

Where it stands

It runs today as a single gateway with a browser client for the TV and the phones. Plugin signatures verify, but the WASM runtime that would load third-party games is still a stub, and the native clients and the streamer overlay are not wired to the server.