Maximo

What it is

A real-time multiplayer system where two players make simultaneous choices over five rounds, and the server keeps the secrets. Each choice sits in tables the client cannot query and is revealed only after both players have committed; the client never receives a partner’s state. An Edge Function mediates every step; subscriptions carry the state to every phone.

In a classroom, a mentor opens a room, shares a join link and sets the pace; a class plays a prisoner’s dilemma on their phones. The instruction is only to reach the highest score. Nobody says whose. The reveal contrasts what cooperation would have produced with what happened.

The problem

Behavioural economics as a lecture does not land with the young. As a round they lose, it lands permanently. Turning that into software means live multiplayer across a room full of phones, and players who will try to read each other’s screens.

The hard part

The reveal only works if the secrecy is real. Readable client-side, one clever twelve year old destroys the lesson for the room. The data model is built around that: split secrets, a server-mediated game, a reveal that is a server event, not an interface transition.

A player who drops the connection rejoins the round in progress instead of ending it for both. The rules open as an overlay that touches nothing, where they used to change the room’s state. Each fix came from watching a real session break in a specific way.