Alignment Arcade

Alignment Arcade is a collection of playable experiments about intelligence, trust, coordination, and what happens when the objective is slightly wrong. Across the collection, you play both sides: the AI and the overseer, whether that overseer is a grader, judge, detective, or someone else trying to keep control.

The games explore alignment through deception, weak supervision, debate, interpretability, collusion, hidden objectives, trait drift, and shutdown decisions. They turn those ideas into choices under uncertainty, where evidence is limited, incentives matter, and the overseer can be wrong too.

Play the collection at games.meowc.at.

Repository

Each top-level game directory is an independent Git repository with its own history and remote, and is ignored by this parent repository.

The shared hosting configuration is the exception: server/ belongs to this root repository. Build every hosted frontend or start the server-backed games from the workspace root:

npm ci
npm run build
npm start

The root package is an npm workspace containing every game with a package.json. npm ci uses the root package-lock.json and hoists compatible dependencies into the root node_modules/; npm keeps only packages that cannot be safely flattened inside individual workspaces. Each game retains its own manifest and can still be installed independently from its repository.

Shared OpenRouter models

Server-backed games read OPENROUTER_API_KEY from the workspace-root .env. Their selectable model catalog is shared through openrouter-models.config.json: freeModelRefreshIntervalMs controls how often the root server queries OpenRouter for currently free models, paidModels is the explicit paid-model allowlist, and defaultModel selects the initial browser choice. fallbackFreeModels keeps games usable when discovery is unavailable. Model entries may be plain OpenRouter IDs or { "id": "provider/model", "name": "Display name" } objects. Paid models are never discovered automatically; adding one to paidModels is the explicit opt-in to paid usage.

The root server refreshes the disk cache automatically. To force a refresh from the server shell, run:

npm run models:refresh

There is intentionally no HTTP refresh endpoint. Browsers can select from the published allowlist but cannot mutate or refresh it.

Caddy

The reusable Caddy routes take two import arguments:

1. The public URL prefix, such as /games.
2. The absolute path to this workspace on the host.

To mount the arcade beneath an existing site:

example.com {
    # Existing site directives can remain here.
    import /path/to/alignment-arcade/server/games.routes.caddy /games /path/to/alignment-arcade
}

This serves the index at https://example.com/games/ and each game beneath its slug. To use a dedicated subdomain with no path prefix, pass an empty quoted first argument:

games.example.com {
    import /path/to/alignment-arcade/server/games.routes.caddy "" /path/to/alignment-arcade
}

No Caddy environment variables are required. The imported routes do not include a catch-all, so unrelated routes in an existing site block remain available. The server-backed games are proxied to the fixed loopback ports 7410 through 7413; keep npm start running alongside Caddy.

The standalone server/Caddyfile provides a local /games configuration. More details and the complete route list are in server/README.md.

Start on boot

On a systemd-based server, install and immediately start a persistent service:

npm ci
npm run build
npm run service:install

The installer detects the current workspace, npm and Node paths, runs the service as the user invoking the script, enables it at boot, and restarts it after failures. It may prompt for sudo while writing the unit and controlling systemd. Do not run the npm command itself with sudo.

Useful service commands:

npm run service:status
journalctl -u alignment-arcade -f
sudo systemctl restart alignment-arcade
npm run service:uninstall

Override SERVICE_NAME, SERVICE_USER, NPM_BIN, or NODE_BIN when installing if the detected defaults do not match the server. For example:

SERVICE_USER=arcade NPM_BIN=/usr/bin/npm NODE_BIN=/usr/bin/node npm run service:install

games.tsv lists repositories managed by the workspace. Its optional fourth column records a public game slug. Run:

./sync-games.sh

Missing games are cloned. Existing games are fetched and fast-forwarded to the latest commit on their configured branch. Before processing the manifest, the script also checks out and fast-forwards this root repository's main branch. It stops rather than changing an unexpected remote or creating a merge commit.