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guan-dan

2026

The Chinese card game Guandan, in your terminal — fair shuffle, open rules, written in Rust. Practice against bots or play four-player rooms over WebSocket.

Code ↗
Year
2026
Stack
  • Rust
Code
GitHub ↗
In-game table — hand, trick, and bots around a terminal board
In-game table — hand, trick, and bots around a terminal board
Lobby — practice vs bots, create room, or quick match
Lobby — practice vs bots, create room, or quick match

掼蛋 (Guandan) is a four-player partnership card game from Huai’an, Jiangsu, hugely popular across the Yangtze delta. guan-dan brings it to the terminal — clean, fair, and open source, the way fight-the-landlord did for 斗地主.

Fair first

  • True random dealing — no card manipulation, no “new-player protection” tricks. Skill and luck, not algorithms and wallets.
  • Transparent rules — the engine and protocol are open source and auditable (MIT).
  • Server-authoritative — the pure engine crate validates every play; clients are thin.

What’s inside

  • Full core rules — level cards, wild cards (逢人配), the bomb ladder, tribute and anti-tribute, playing up through A.
  • Four players, two teams — classic partnership seating (0+2 vs 1+3).
  • Bot practice — one human plus three heuristic bots, no network needed beyond a local server.
  • Online rooms — create, join, or quick-match over WebSocket.
  • Keyboard and mouse — rank shortcuts, arrow selection, click to select, double-click to play, right-click to pass.
  • Bilingual UI — Chinese-first, with English where it matters.

Install

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SihanTeng/guan-dan/main/install.sh | bash

# then
guandan                          # default ws://127.0.0.1:9100
guandan --server ws://host:9100
# Windows
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SihanTeng/guan-dan/main/install.ps1 | iex

From source (Rust 1.75+):

cargo run -p guandan-server -- --bind 0.0.0.0:9100
cargo run -p guandan-client -- --server ws://127.0.0.1:9100

Controls (short list)

Input Action
← → / click Move hand cursor / select card
Space Toggle card selection
Double-click / Enter Play
Right-click / P Pass
Rank keys 3–A, B/R Multi-select by rank
C Card counter
H Help
Esc Back / clear

Under the hood

Rust throughout: guandan-core (pure rules), guandan-protocol, guandan-server, guandan-client, plus guandan-bot heuristics. Installers and CI live on GitHub Releases.