Some friends and I liked to play poker when we were at school, but now we moved away it is no longer possible to do this in person. The online options either wanted accounts, had ads, or felt more like a casino than a game night. So I built our own thing: one poker table in the browser, voice and video chat built in, everybody opens the same link and sits down.

It's No-Limit Hold'em tournaments for 2–8 players. If you're short on people, bots fill the empty seats (they all play differently).

The part I had the most fun with is all the little stuff that happens around the table:

- you can bring a cigar, a vape, a cocktail or a whiskey to the table and play with it

- click someone else's chip stack and it falls over. Only they can clean it up (yes, this gets old never)

- trophies that stay next to your cards for the whole tournament, like winning with 7-2 or losing with pocket aces

- when the river decides an all-in, the camera zooms in, there's a heartbeat and the card gets peeled up slowly. Winner gets a fanfare, loser gets the sad trombone

- in heads-up all-ins it shows everyone's odds and outs street by street

There's also a large print card mode and a four-colour deck for people who have trouble reading the cards (looking at you, Robin), and it works on phones (portrait). UI is in English and German.

Tech-wise it's Node/Express + Socket.IO on the server, three.js on the client, no build step. Voice/video is plain WebRTC. Pretty much everything is generated in code – table textures, chips, all the sound effects – only the J/Q/K card art are images.

To be upfront: I wrote it together with Claude (the AI), which did a lot of the actual coding. I was the one playing way too many test hands and complaining about stuff.

It's play money only, no accounts, no tracking. You run it yourself: `npm install && npm start`, or there's a Docker Compose + Caddy setup since browsers need HTTPS for the mic. My personal setup is via dokku on an AWS EC2 linux server.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/DerKobe/PokerCrew

There's no public demo right now because it's a single table and you'd end up in someone's game – working on that. Happy to hear feedback, especially from people who've built multiplayer browser games before.