▶ COMING SOON // iOS + ANDROID + MAC + PC
Clackyard
Match the ends. Cover every double.
Lowest count wins.
Match the pips and run your own train out from the centre double — and the turn you can't, your train is open for the whole table to play on. Two domino games, Mexican Train and Chicken Foot, for a table of two to sixteen. Everybody brings their own screen — a phone, a tablet, a laptop — one of them hosts the table, and any empty seat is filled by a bot. Lay a double and it has to be covered before anybody plays anywhere else; in Chicken Foot it wants three tiles before the table moves on. Every round opens one double lower, whatever is left in your hand counts against you, and the lowest total at the end wins.
Both store buttons are dead on purpose. Clackyard is not on the App Store and not on Google Play yet, so there is nothing behind them to link to — they become real links the day it is live, and not one day earlier. What we can tell you now is the shape: paid once, and one App Store purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac. No ads, no in-app purchases, no account, no sign-in. Questions before then: info@machinautstudios.com.
▶ THE LOOP
HOW IT PLAYS
A game is one round per double, from the top of the set down to double-blank — or one, three, five or seven of them, if the host would rather be in bed by eleven. Whatever you are still holding when somebody goes out counts against you, and the lowest total at the end wins. Nobody shuffles a hundred and ninety tiles, nobody counts pips by hand, and nobody argues about whose train is open.
-
THE ENGINE
ONE DOUBLE IN THE MIDDLE
Every round opens on a single double set face up in the middle of the table, and everyone draws a hand from the rest of the shuffled set — the boneyard. Round one opens on the highest double in the set; each round after it opens one lower, all the way down to double-blank.
-
MEXICAN TRAIN
YOUR TRAIN, UNTIL IT ISN'T
Every seat builds its own train out from the engine, one tile a turn, each tile matching the end it joins. Can't play? Draw one from the boneyard. Still can't? A marker goes on your train, and it stays open for anybody to play on until you play on it yourself.
-
THE MEXICAN TRAIN
THE TRAIN NOBODY OWNS
One extra train belongs to nobody. Anybody may start it and anybody may play on it, from the first turn of the round. It is where a hand goes to shed a heavy tile, and where you go when your own train is stuck.
-
THE DOUBLE
COVER IT OR STALL
In Mexican Train, lay a double and you play again. Leave it open and nobody plays anywhere else until somebody covers it — which is how you hand the next player a problem on purpose. Doubles chain; the turn ends on the first tile that isn't one.
-
CHICKEN FOOT
THREE TOES, THEN MOVE ON
The centre double takes six arms before play goes anywhere else. After that, every double laid grows a chicken foot: three tiles on it, and nobody plays anywhere else until it has all three. A double-blank left in your hand at the end costs 50.
-
THE TABLE
TWO TO SIXTEEN SEATS
Double-9, double-12, double-15 or double-18 — the set is chosen for the number of seats unless the host chooses one, and a double-18 seats sixteen. The host also sets the rounds, how hard the bots play, an optional turn timer and a shelf of house rules, and they are remembered for next game night.
▶ THE ARRANGEMENT
ONE DEVICE OWNS THE GAME
No server of ours. There isn't one to have.
Clackyard is self-hosted. One player's device holds the only real boneyard, runs every rule, and sends each of the other seats a version of the table with every other player's hand blanked out before it leaves. Nobody can see a tile they are not holding, and that includes the host. Close the app mid-round and the table is still there when you come back; up to twenty unfinished games wait on a shelf, rules and roster intact.
-
SOLO
PLAY VS BOTS
Deal a table against bots — easy, normal or hard — and it needs no network of any kind. The whole game is running on the device in your hand, opponents included.
-
SAME WI-FI
THE ROOM FINDS ITSELF
Host on one device and the table shows up by itself on every other device on the network, or type the host's address if it doesn't. Nothing leaves the building: the tiles travel over your own Wi-Fi and stop at the wall.
-
ONLINE // OPT-IN
A CODE, OR A LINK
Switch the table to Online and the lobby shows a six-character join code — read it down the phone, or share an invite link that opens the app on the join screen with the code already filled in. Rooms are found through Epic Online Services, which carries the packets between houses — the host's device still owns the game. Still no account: the login is anonymous and per-device. It is off unless you choose it, and a build without Epic credentials cannot offer it at all.
Online play is the one part of this game that leans on somebody else's servers. Solo and same-Wi-Fi tables lean on nothing but the devices in the room, and they are the ones we would tell you to buy it for.
▶ THE HONEST BIT
ONE PRICE, FOREVER
Clackyard is a premium game and nothing else. No ads. No in-app purchases. No account, no sign-in. No analytics. There is no subscription, no season pass, no currency, no energy meter and no tile-skin shop — none of those things were built, so none of them can arrive in an update you didn't ask for. You buy it once and own all of it.
-
APPLE
ONE PURCHASE, THREE DEVICES
iPhone, iPad and Mac on a single Universal Purchase — buy it once and it is on all three. Family Sharing covers the household, which for a game you play around a kitchen table is rather the point.
-
GOOGLE PLAY
THE SAME NUMBER
Paid once, up front, and deliberately the same figure Apple carries. A game whose players are sitting in one room must not show two different prices when they compare phones across the table.
-
DESKTOP // A PLAN
WINDOWS + LINUX
The same game on Windows and Linux, through Steam, intended and not dated. There is no store page behind this yet, so treat it as a plan rather than a listing.
We do not print prices here. A figure written on this page goes stale the day a store moves it and nobody notices; the store page you buy from is always current and always right for your territory.
▶ ONE CODEBASE
WHERE IT RUNS
Built with Flutter: one codebase across iOS, iPadOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux. The rules of both games are one pure-Dart engine that no screen, no bot and no network layer is allowed to second-guess, and the host's device is the one running it — so a phone and a laptop at the same table are reading the same game rather than each keeping its own opinion of it.
-
PLATFORMS
POCKET, LAP, TABLE
iPhone and iPad, Android phones and tablets, and desktops — and an iPad in the middle of the table is a genuinely good way to run the host seat. Tiles are drawn two ways, and it is your call, not the screen size's: real pips, each number in its own colour the way a colour-dot set looks, or the numerals themselves, legible at any size.
-
SETTINGS
MOTION YOU CAN TURN OFF
Every slide, clack and burst on the table honours reduce motion: the movement stops and the meaning stays, including the slow swirl of the felt behind the tiles. Sound and haptics have their own switches, and the running total of your hand under the rack can be turned off once you would rather count for yourself.
▶ ON THE RECORD
IT COLLECTS NOTHING
Clackyard has no account, no sign-in, no server of ours, no analytics and no crash reporter, and there is no advertising or in-app-purchase code in the build at all. Your name, your avatar, your settings, your lifetime stats and your saved games are written to your own device's storage and stay there; deleting the app deletes all of it. A solo game or a same-Wi-Fi table sends nothing past your own network. Choosing Online — which you do on purpose, on the Host or Join screen or by opening an invite link — is the one exception, and the privacy page says exactly what reaches Epic Online Services when you do, and what does not. Purchases are handled by the store you bought from; we never see payment details.
▶ SUPPORT
SOMETHING NOT WORKING?
Email info@machinautstudios.com and we will help. A real person reads it. Say which device you are on and whether the table was solo, on the Wi-Fi or online — the version number is under Settings → About.
-
SAME WI-FI
THE TABLE DOESN'T SHOW UP
Every device has to be on the same network, and guest, hotel and some mesh networks stop devices from seeing each other at all. On iPhone, iPad and Mac, Clackyard also needs Local Network switched on under Settings → Privacy & Security. If the list stays empty, type the address the host's lobby shows.
-
ONLINE
THE CODE FINDS NOTHING
A code finds a table only while the host has it open, and only between compatible versions of the app — update both devices and try again. A table the host marked private never appears in the room list; it is reached by its code and nothing else.
-
A DROPPED SEAT
SOMEBODY FELL OFF
A player whose phone drops off the table keeps their seat and their tiles, and opening the app again offers them the seat back. The host decides whether a bot plays a dropped seat in the meantime or the table waits — waiting is the default.
▶ WHERE THE PARTS CAME FROM
CREDITS
Every tile, the felt and the app icon are drawn in code — painters and a fragment shader, no imported art. Every sound is synthesized rather than recorded, the clack included: one modelled resin tile landing on one modelled tabletop, jittered so that a shuffle of ninety clacks never sounds like one sample on repeat. Type is Lilita One and Nunito, both under the SIL Open Font License, with the licence texts bundled in the app's own licence page. Everything else came off our own line.