Mytheder

The database was doing nothing

The game only ever read cards from MySQL — three queries, no writes. All 1016 cards now load from JSON at boot and the entire database layer is gone. Adding cards is editing a file; there are no migrations.

Most of the work was failure handling

The bugs that actually ruined games were never about rules.

• A one-second auth timeout was fine on localhost and killed every real connection through a proxy
• One dropped socket ended everyone's game, because rooms were destroyed the moment they fell below three players
• A small pack could run its prompt pile dry and take the room down with it
• A player who dropped out of a full game was locked out by a headcount they were still part of

Re-skinnable by design

The first build hard-coded one accent colour across ten components. Every colour now resolves from three tokens, so giving a new community its own version is a config change and four images rather than a hunt through the codebase.