magmacrunch

The terminal arcade. One command, a menu of every cabinet installed on the machine, and a way into one.

Install

The quickest way in, on any platform, is not to install it at all:

uvx magmacrunch

uv pulls the arcade and its cabinets into a throwaway environment and starts them. Nothing lands on your PATH, nothing can collide with anything, and it behaves the same on macOS, Linux and Windows — every package in the stack is a pure-Python py3-none-any wheel, so there is nothing to compile on any of them. pipx run magmacrunch is the same trick if you already have pipx.

To keep the command around afterwards:

uv tool install magmacrunch

pipx install magmacrunch does the same job. Either one puts magmacrunch — and each cabinet's own command — on your PATH inside an isolated virtualenv.

That one install brings the arcade and all three cabinets.

If you reached for pip

pip install magmacrunch is not wrong, but on its own it is the one route that regularly installs successfully and then appears to have done nothing. Three ways that happens, all of them recoverable:

• error: externally-managed-environment. Homebrew and most current Python builds refuse to install into the system Python. That is pip working correctly, not a broken package. Use uv, pipx, or a virtualenv.
• It installed, but the command is not on your PATH. pip only reaches your PATH from an activated virtualenv or with --user. Run against a system Python, the arcade is on disk and unreachable.
• You installed it from inside IPython or a notebook. It went into whatever environment that kernel runs on, which is usually not the one your shell reaches.

In all three the arcade is already installed, and this starts it, PATH or no PATH:

python3 -m magmacrunch

One more, because it costs people five minutes: magmacrunch is a shell command. Typing it at a >>> prompt is only ever a NameError — leave Python first.

Playing

magmacrunch          the arcade — every cabinet on the machine
george-boole         2048 with logic gates, on its own
lava-dome            solo hold'em, on its own
moonlight-drift      the endless drifter, on its own

A game plays identically whether you start it directly or pick it from the arcade: the arcade is not a wrapper around them, it is the same host they run on.

On the arcade floor, ←→ move between cabinets, ↑↓ move a row, Enter plays and Q quits. Esc inside a game returns to the arcade, not to the shell — which is the whole reason the host exists.

A cabinet says so on its own title screen, and only when the arcade started it: the same key ends the session when the game was launched as its own command, so a hint printed unconditionally would be a lie half the time. Games ask Host.seated to tell the two apart, and nothing else about them changes — see magmacrunch.engine.arcade.

Each card carries your best score on that cabinet, read from the same file the game writes when you set one — so it is there the moment you come back from the run that set it. A cabinet you have never played says nothing rather than BEST 0, which would be inviting you to beat a score that does not exist.

                                                                     __
    .--------.---.-.-----.--------.---.-.----.----.--.--.-----.----.|  |--.
    |        |  _  |  _  |        |  _  |  __|   _|  |  |     |  __||     |
    |__|__|__|___._|___  |__|__|__|___._|____|__| |_____|__|__|____||__|__|
                   |_____|
                         EVERY CABINET ON THIS MACHINE
                                  INSERT COIN


      ┌──────────────────────────────┐  ┌──────────────────────────────┐
      │ George Boole Has Entered The │  │ Moonlight Drift              │
      │ Chat                         │  │                              │
      │                              │  │ Thread the columns. Hold to  │
      │ 2048 played with logic gates │  │ climb, release to fall.      │
      │ — merge, invert, overflow.   │  │                              │
      │                              │  │                              │
      │ ▶ ENTER_        BEST 131,072 │  │ ▶ ENTER           BEST 8,420 │
      └──────────────────────────────┘  └──────────────────────────────┘
                                   PAGE 1/2


                      ↑↓←→ CHOOSE    ENTER PLAY    Q QUIT
                 © 2026 magmacrunch media  ·  magmacrunch.com

It is magmacrunch.com/arcade in a shell — the same palette, the same card grid, the same blinking cursor on the card you are about to start. The one thing that could not come across is the typography: arcade.css sets Press Start 2P on nearly every string, and a terminal program does not choose its font. Pixel lettering has to be drawn, out of block glyphs, which is what the narrow title variant does — and what the web page's own title art does too, in Courier Prime rather than Press Start 2P, for the same reason.

The title art stands down as the window grows or shrinks, and always before the cabinets have to — which is what keeps the floor as low as it is:

Art is measured rather than declared, so the 119-column piece can sit at the top of the list without ever bothering someone on an ordinary terminal — it is simply never the one that fits. Adding your own is one entry in VARIANTS in banner.py and nothing else.

Choosing a cabinet starts it on the terminal the arcade is already holding. Leaving the game brings you back here. Every game is also its own command (george-boole, lava-dome, moonlight-drift) and plays identically either way — the arcade is not a wrapper around them, it is the same host they run on.

What is installed

magmacrunch --list

Prints every cabinet found, what terminal size it wants, and how it wants input. If a game you installed is not in the menu, this says why — a game that fails to load is reported rather than silently skipped.

How games get here

Games are not bundled. Each one lives in its own repo alongside its browser and Wii versions, publishes its own wheel, and declares an entry point:

[project.entry-points."magmacrunch.games"]
george-boole = "boole.arcade:GAME"

pointing at an object with info: GameInfo and start(host) -> scene. The launcher enumerates that group at startup. Installing a game makes it appear here; uninstalling makes it vanish; neither needs a release of the arcade.

Nothing in this package imports a game, so the arcade runs with none installed and tells you how to get one. The contract lives in magmacrunch.engine.arcade; the three cabinets in the table below are worked examples of it.

Cabinets

Installing magmacrunch installs all three.

Requires

Python 3.10+, and a terminal at least 36×17. Individual cabinets ask for more (around 59×22); below that their card greys out, says the size it wants, and cannot be started. The arcade's own floor is deliberately lower than any game's, so getting to the floor is never the thing that fails.

Two cards sit side by side from 70 columns and stack into one below that. More cabinets than fit are paged, not scrolled.

Truecolor helps but is not required.

Licence

Two licences, split at the same seam the code is. The launcher is PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — LICENSE — because the games it seats are. The TUI engine, everything under magmacrunch/engine/, is Apache-2.0 — LICENSE-APACHE — because it depends on none of them, and because texastoast still ships the same extracted code under it.

Every engine file carries an SPDX header saying which. NOTICE sets out both in full.