tuimanji

A pubnix-local turn-based multiplayer TUI. No server. No accounts. Just log in to the same box as your friend and play something.

Tuimanji bundles ten turn-based games — Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect 4, Reversi, Chess, Checkers, Battleship, Crazy Eights, Peg Solitaire, the Royal Game of Ur, and Mastermind — behind a single Textual terminal UI. Matches live in a shared SQLite database; clients coordinate via file locks and append-only writes. It's designed for pubnix boxes, shared servers, and old-school SSH shenanigans.

Why no server?

Because everything you need to synchronize turn-based games is already on the box: a filesystem, a SQLite binary, and flock(2). Running a daemon to marshal moves would be more infrastructure to break. Instead:

• State lives in tuimanji.db — one file under $TUIMANJI_DB, WAL mode, PRAGMA busy_timeout=5000.
• Writes are append-only. Each turn is a new row; nothing is ever updated. Replay, spectating, and crash-resume fall out for free.
• Concurrency is layered. The app checks "is it your turn?"; SQLite's BEGIN IMMEDIATE serializes writers; a (match_id, turn) unique constraint catches anything that slips through.
• Identity is a session slot. flocking $TUIMANJI_DB/.sessions/<user>/N.lock lets two terminals for the same unix user claim distinct player ids (user, user#2, …) — great for local testing, still sane for shared hosts.

Install

# one-shot run
uv tool run tuimanji

# persistent install
uv tool install tuimanji
# or
pipx install tuimanji
# or
pip install --user tuimanji

Requires Python 3.13+ and a terminal that speaks 256 colors.

Run

tuimanji                # open the lobby
tuimanji new chess      # create a new match + jump to its waiting room
tuimanji join a1b2c3d4  # join (or rejoin) an existing match
tuimanji resume         # open your most recent unfinished match
tuimanji games          # list available games
tuimanji where          # print the resolved database directory
tuimanji --version

The shared database defaults to /var/games/tuimanji/. On a machine where you don't own that path, override it:

export TUIMANJI_DB=~/.local/share/tuimanji
# or per-command
tuimanji --db ~/.local/share/tuimanji

Everyone playing against each other has to point at the same directory.

Pubnix / shared host setup

For multiple users to share /var/games/tuimanji/, the directory needs to be writable by all of them. The easiest way is to mark it sticky + world-writable, the same way /tmp is, once at install time (as root):

sudo install -d -m 1777 /var/games/tuimanji

When tuimanji sees the data dir set up that way, it propagates the same intent to everything it creates inside: .sessions/ becomes 1777 so every user can mkdir their own subdir, and tuimanji.db plus its WAL sidecars get 0o666 so writes from any user succeed. If the data dir isn't sticky+world-writable, tuimanji leaves permissions alone — your personal ~/.local/share/tuimanji stays private.

If you'd rather scope sharing to a unix group:

sudo groupadd tuimanji
sudo install -d -m 2775 -g tuimanji /var/games/tuimanji
sudo usermod -aG tuimanji alice  # repeat per user

…and have each user run with a permissive umask (umask 0002) so files they create stay group-writable. The auto-propagation above only kicks in for the sticky+world-writable layout; for groups, you set the policy and tuimanji honors what it finds.

Games

Controls

Per-game quirks are surfaced in the status strip at the bottom of each match.

Adding a game

A game is one module under src/tuimanji/games/ implementing the tuimanji.engine.Game protocol — pure functions over state dicts. No I/O, no database access. See docs/adding-a-game.md for a walkthrough, or read src/tuimanji/games/peg_solitaire.py for the minimal single-player shape.

from tuimanji import Game, REGISTRY, IllegalAction

class MyGame:  # satisfies the Game protocol structurally
    id = "my-game"
    name = "My Game"
    min_players = 2
    max_players = 2
    # ... initial_state, apply_action, current_player, winner, is_terminal,
    # ... render, initial_cursor, move_cursor, cursor_action, animation_for

Development

git clone https://github.com/alanbato/tuimanji
cd tuimanji
uv sync
uv run pytest -q
prek install    # pre-commit hooks (ruff, ty)
uv run tuimanji

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full contributor guide.

License

LGPL-3.0-or-later. See COPYING.LESSER (which extends the GPLv3 in COPYING).

Modifications to Tuimanji itself must be released under the LGPL, but larger works that merely use the library (e.g. a game module wired into the REGISTRY) are not required to adopt the same license.