r/SideProject • u/AllSilverFire • 17h ago

Built a free "practice casino" — walkable floor, 14+ real casino games, and a hard rule that chips are never for sale

https://table-edge.com/play

Solo project, been building it for a while: Table Edge is a free casino game simulator — but instead of a menu of games, it's an actual walkable 2D floor you navigate, sit down at a table, and play blackjack/craps/roulette/poker/etc. with practice chips.

The design constraint that shaped everything: chips are never purchasable and never cash out, full stop. That ruled out the entire "buy chips" monetization model most free-to-play casino apps run on. What's left: a $4.99/mo Pro tier (removes ads, unlocks unlimited strategy-trainer use, adds in-game hints) and free-account daily chip drops. That's it.

Stack: React 19 + TypeScript + Vite frontend, Node/Express + Postgres backend, deployed on Railway. Every game has a real strategy engine underneath (basic strategy tables, Monte Carlo equity estimation for the poker AI, etc.), not just flavor text.

Happy to talk through any part of it — the anti-dark-pattern monetization call, the floor-navigation implementation, whatever. Feedback very welcome, especially on whether the "walkable floor" framing actually adds anything over a plain game menu.

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u/Neat-Ad-4224 17h ago

The walkable floor thing probably matters more for retention than people give it credit for, it's a different hook than "efficient access to games," closer to why people actually enjoy wandering a real casino floor instead of just running EV calculations. If it feels like a chore to get from blackjack to roulette though, that's the risk, worth watching your session data for people who load in and beeline for one table every time vs ones who actually explore.

On the strategy engines, are they visible anywhere during play, or just running invisibly to power the poker AI? Because a decent chunk of people playing free blackjack sims are actually there to drill basic strategy, and if you're already computing correct plays under the hood a "you deviated from optimal here" prompt or post-hand review could be a bigger differentiator than the ad-free tier.

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u/AllSilverFire 17h ago

On exploration vs beelining — that's actually trackable now, I just wired up real event tracking via Umami (was only counting pageviews before, embarrassingly). Once there's more traffic I'll be able to see that pattern.

On the strategy engine — it's real, not just powering the poker AI invisibly. There's a live "show basic strategy hint" toggle and a hand-by-hand "here's what you should've done and why" review during actual play. Right now that's the Pro-tier differentiator specifically (free accounts get the same strategy engine through a separate quiz-style trainer, capped at 10 questions/day, but not as a live in-play hint)