Code Roulette

Digital Russian Roulette with remote code execution for the loser.

It’s obvious you shouldn’t play Russian Roulette in real life. Perhaps in light of that is why so many variations of the game have sprouted up across movies, tv shows, and games. But, through those existing digital mediums there’s something lacking. A certain air is absent from those representations.

It is the risk.

And we could dive into the concepts behind, “risk making the reward,” but that’s for another time. What we’re checking out today is how I brought digital risk to the networked table.

Code Roulette is a terminal-based, graphical game of Russian Roulette where you compete against another player to see who will have a computer program, selected by their opponent, run on their computer. That is to say, you can play a 2D game of Russian Roulette where the opponent gets to execute some arbitrary code on your computer if you lose.

Check out the code on GitHub.

Or keep reading to learn more about the story of how this came to be.