The Arcade

Where to Find It

The Arcade lives in Hogsmeade. From the village screen look for "A — The Arcade" under the marketplace nav. Madam Phlox runs the counter; the cabinets are along the back wall, sulking in the dimmer corners.

There's also a back door: a runaway cabinet has gone feral somewhere in the Forbidden Forest. Find it once (see the Forest Arcade Portal) and a permanent portal opens straight from the forest nav — no trip to Hogsmeade required after that.

The Eleven Cabinets

Cabinet	What it is	Score cap
Basilisk	Snake — eat apples, don't bite your tail. Perfect-clear bonus +500 when you fill the grid (text mode).	5,000
Wizard's Duel	Pong against the cabinet. First to 7.	70
Brick by Brick	Breakout. 8×5 wall, 3 lives, infinite levels.	10,000
Seven Potters	Asteroids-style wave shooter. Cast Stupefy / Expelliarmus / Protego to vaporise comets.	20,000
Engorgement Charm	Hole.io — absorb smaller blobs, avoid bigger ones. 30-second round.	30,000
Rune Stacking	Tetris with three piece shapes (square, bar, L). Garbage row erupts every 8 placements.	15,000
Hippogriff Flight	Side-scrolling broomstick obstacle course. Dodge bludgers, ceilings, hoop walls.	20,000
Quidditch Sprint	Three-lane runner down the pitch. Swap lane, jump, or duck past bludgers, low brooms, banners, and pillars; grab quaffles (+25) and the snitch (+250). Difficulty ramps with score. Built on PixiJS.	30,000
Devil's Snare	Vine-escape puzzle. Free vines that have a clear straight path off the board, head first; a blocked pick snuffs a Lumos charge. Each timed bed grows larger and more tangled as you descend.	10,000
Boggart's Lair	Among Us-style social deduction. The cabinet flips a coin for your role: a student finishing 5 task pads while a hidden boggart hunts, or the boggart Replacing students without being witnessed. Sabotage drops the lights.	10,000
Wizard Chess	Chess against the cabinet's AI at three difficulties (Apprentice / Adept / Archmage). You play the gold army (White) and move first; checkmate to win. A pawn reaching the eighth rank opens a promotion picker — Queen, Rook, Bishop, or Knight, since the rules insist the lesser ambitions stay available; Escape there backs out of the choice rather than out of the game. Canvas-only, but screen-reader playable via a hidden board and algebraic move box (which takes its own promotion letter, e.g. e7e8n).	1,000

Tokens

Every game costs one arcade token per round. Tokens are tracked per game day:

• 5 free tokens refill at dawn (default; configurable by admin)
• Trade forest turns 1:1 for tokens at Madam Phlox's counter. Same ratio as most things.
• Donator points buy tokens at the Prefect's Lounge — same conversion the lounge uses for forest fights (3 DP per token, default)
• Persistent token packs sold from the lobby: 100 DP buys +1 token per game day for 30 days; stack up to 5 packs for +5/day

Tokens deduct when a round starts, not when the score is submitted — no reload-grinding.

Rewards

Every round pays out gold + experience equivalent to a forest fight against a creature of your level, scaled by how well you did. Performance = your score divided by the cabinet's cap.

• Gold: e_rand(level × 8, level × 20) × performance
• Experience: (level² × 2 + level × 10) × performance
• Gem chance: same table as forest gem rolls, but only triggers when performance is ≥ 50% of cap

A maxed score pays roughly what a victory against a level-L creature would pay. A score of zero pays nothing. The result drops into your pouch immediately — no separate result screen, the overlay shows what you earned.

How a Round Plays

1. Click Play [Game] from the lobby. Costs 1 token.
2. The game page loads with the canvas and an instructional overlay.
3. Press Space or tap the canvas to start. The game doesn't tick until you do.
4. Play until you die (or, in Pong, until someone reaches 7).
5. An overlay appears on the canvas showing score, personal best, and rewards earned (gold / XP / gem).
6. Choose Play again (if you have tokens left), Leaderboard, or Back to Arcade.

The page does not reload between rounds — rewards are banked via background fetch and the session is saved immediately.

Controls

Keyboard: documented in the "How to play" section above each canvas. Common bindings: arrow keys or WASD to move, Space for the primary action (serve / launch / cast / hard drop / flap), Escape to leave.

Touch / mouse: every game renders an on-screen button pad below the canvas. Buttons synthesise the corresponding keyboard event, so the same per-game logic handles both.

Mobile: the touchpad is the primary input on phones. Canvas scales to viewport width.

Text Mode (Accessibility)

Every game except Wizard Chess has a fully playable turn-based text-mode equivalent (Wizard Chess is canvas-only; its accessibility lives in the canvas itself — a hidden board table, an algebraic move box, and ARIA narration). Switch via the "Switch to accessible text mode" link at the top of any game page. Text mode is:

• Screen-reader friendly — uses semantic HTML, ARIA live regions, and standard buttons
• Turn-based — no real-time pressure, no animation
• Identical scoring — text and canvas scores feed the same leaderboard
• The default for users with prefers-reduced-motion: reduce

Text-mode rules differ to fit a turn-based format (e.g. Pong becomes a hex-block-and-return duel, Breakout becomes a turn-based artillery shot, Hippogriff Flight and Quidditch Sprint become column-by-column obstacle resolvers, Devil's Snare a letter-grid of vines you free one at a time, Boggart's Lair a narrated grid that states your position and what you sense each turn) but the cap and reward path are the same.

Leaderboards

The Arcade Leaderboard (link in the lobby) shows two views:

• Composite Champions — each cabinet scored as a fraction of its cap and scaled to 1,000. Max composite is 11,000 (11 games × 1,000). No single cabinet's cap dominates the ranking.
• By Cabinet — top 10 raw scores per game.

Your row is highlighted gold. All player name color codes render correctly.

Anti-Cheat

Canvas games run client-side, so the minimum bar:

• One-shot play token per round — stored server-side, cleared on submit. Replaying a forged POST fails.
• Per-game score cap — server clamps any submitted score above the cabinet's cap.
• Per-day token pool already limits volume.
• Debuglog audit trail — every score, gold, exp, and gem payout is logged under the "arcade" tag for admin review.

A full server-authoritative game simulation is out of scope; the caps + tokens make the worst-case forgery cost capped per day.

Strategy

• Pick the cabinet you're best at — performance matters more than raw score for rewards. A 90% Snake (4,500 / 5,000) pays more than a 30% Engorgement (9,000 / 30,000).
• Save tokens for end-of-day if you want to gauge your remaining fight budget first.
• Trade only excess forest turns — forest combat usually pays slightly better when you're still leveling fast.
• Token packs vs one-shot: one-shot is 3 DP/token; a pack is ~3.33 DP/token. Packs are an 11% premium for set-and-forget convenience.
• Text mode is your friend on mobile — no canvas focus issues, no thumb gymnastics.