射龍門(In-Between) is a classic during Chinese New Year. Two cards go face-up, you bet on whether the next card lands between them. If it does, you win. If it doesn't—or if it matches one of the gate cards—you pay.

It takes thirty seconds to learn. The table gets loud, everyone has opinions on your bet. Growing up, it was my favorite part of the holiday.

It's a game that's only fun with people in the same room—but I took it as a challenge to make that chaos and excitement work remotely.

Someone creates a room and gets a code. Share it, up to eight people can join. No accounts, no sign-ups, just pick a nickname.

The host sets the rules: starting chips, ante, what happens when you hit the post. Then you play in real-time, watching each other's bets and card reveals as they happen.

The hardest part wasn't the multiplayer or the game logic—it was making it feel like the real thing.

The draw moment. In real life, there's a second where someone flips the middle card and the whole table holds its breath. I tried a few interactions—auto-revealing, card squeezing—and finally settled on draw + swipe to reveal. It mimics the suspense and how players always want to draw their own card, as if that would somehow change the result.

Bilingual. The app runs in both 繁體中文 and English, and you can switch anytime.

Bankruptcy and rescue. When someone goes broke, the game pauses and other players can gift them chips to keep them in. During CNY, the spirit is generosity—if you've won a lot, sliding a few chips to someone who's out is just what you do.

I kept getting tempted to add things—sound effects, custom rule packs, more real-life-mimicking interactions. But every time, I came back to the same question: does this make it better for a group of friends on a call?

Sound effects would be nice eventually, but they weren't blocking anyone from having fun. So I shipped without them. The game has tons of rule variations that make it more chaotic, but for v1.0—default rules first.

I used Expo and React Native so I could move fast and iterate on iOS without a long compile cycle. For real-time multiplayer, I went with Colyseus over raw WebSockets—it handles room management, state sync, and reconnection out of the box, so I could focus on game logic instead of networking plumbing.

One decision I'm glad I made early: all game logic runs on the server. The client just renders what the server tells it. It means nobody can cheat by modifying their app!

This isn't a casino app. No real money, just in-game chips that reset every session. No ads, no in-app purchases. I made this because I wanted to play 射龍門 with my friends. That's it.

The app collects no personal data. No accounts, no emails, no tracking. Room codes and nicknames exist only for the duration of a session and are not stored afterward.

We use Sentry for crash reporting to help fix bugs and improve stability. No advertising SDKs, no analytics tracking. What happens in your game stays in your game.

射龍門(In-Between) is better with people you know. Get on a call with your friends, your family, your CNY table that's spread across different cities this year.

Visit Web App

Questions or issues? I'd love to hear about it.

Email me · Send feedback