One line. Two minds. No certainty.
Blind Front is a compact strategic casual game for one player against a rule-based opponent. Every battle begins with twenty points on each side. Every round, both players secretly decide how many points to commit.
The higher bid moves the front line one step toward enemy headquarters. Both bids are spent. A tie consumes resources but moves nothing. Take the headquarters to win the battle; win enough battles to reach the capital and end the war.
There are no reflex tests and no long rulebook. The game lives in a single recurring question: how much do you think this moment is worth — and what do you think the other side believes?
Battle
Win a round and the ◆ advances toward enemy headquarters.
How the war unfolds
- Choose a bid from zero up to the points you still hold.
- Reveal both choices. The opponent adapts to the battle, its remaining resources, and your past behaviour — but never sees your current bid.
- Move the front. The higher bid advances; a tie leaves the line where it is.
- Think beyond this round. Every point used now is a point unavailable later.
- Win the campaign. Each battle pushes the war front toward one of the two capitals.
War
Each battle won moves the ◆ toward the opposing capital.
The app is becoming a medium
The rise of vibe coding is usually described as a gain in speed: ideas become working software in days or hours, and a solo creator can build what once required a team. But the more important change may be cultural rather than technical.
When software becomes faster and cheaper to make, it no longer needs to justify its existence only as a permanent SaaS product or a practical utility. It can become editorial, temporary, situated, poetic. It can be published with the rhythm of an essay, a small game, a poster, or a short film.
Code does not only solve a problem. It can stage a condition, give an idea rules, and let someone experience an argument from the inside.
Software as utility
Complete a task.
Optimise a process.
Remain useful over time.
App as medium
Inhabit a condition.
Make an idea tangible.
Leave a cognitive or emotional trace.
This does not make utility obsolete. It opens another territory: experiential software, where interface, rules, rhythm, friction, and response are part of the author’s language.
The rule is the message
Blind Front is deliberately small. It does not need a fictional universe or a complex simulation to produce tension. Its expressive material is the blind bid itself.
You never know the other side’s present intention. You only see previous behaviour, the position of the front, and the resources still available. Every choice is therefore both tactical and interpretive. You are not simply spending points; you are forming a theory of another mind.
The game turns uncertainty, scarcity, escalation, bluff, and restraint into actions. Instead of reading an essay about those ideas, the player briefly inhabits them. This is what it means to treat the app as a medium: the interaction carries the meaning.
Built as an executable sketch
Blind Front was created as a small vibe coding experiment: conceived through dialogue, authored in code, tested in the browser, and distributed directly on the web through Netlify/Itch.
It is self-contained, immediately playable, and intentionally modest in scale. That modesty is part of the format. Not every digital idea needs to become a platform. Some can remain executable sketches: complete enough to be experienced, light enough to be published freely.
Free to play · Browser based · English and Italian
About the project
Blind Front is an experiment by DialoArt / Roberto Gilli, AI Product Builder and Game Designer. It belongs to an ongoing exploration of vibe coding as a communication medium: the meeting point between software architecture, game design, and digital authorship.