What is pole-chudes-2?

Pole Chudes 2 is a faithful browser port of a 1993 Russian DOS game show of the same name. The game is similar in concept to Wheel of Fortune: contestants spin a wheel, pick letters, and try to solve a word puzzle across multiple tournament rounds. The original DOS version was published by Vadim Bashurov and the source code was never released. This TypeScript reimplementation recreates the complete game from the original binary files and a public-domain disassembly. It covers every part of the original experience: the splash intro, player name entry, eight tournament stages from the first round through the superfinal, the 16-sector spinning wheel, the letter-picking hand cursor, an assistant who flips letters on the board, a card minigame, prize bargaining, advertisement breaks, the closing ceremony, and the final top-8 table. One notable aspect of the project is that it ships none of the original binary files. Instead, every asset is converted to a format you can open and edit: the 61 game sprites become individual lossless WebP image files, the three bitmap fonts become WebP glyph sheets, and the question database of 686 entries becomes plain JSON. The build can reverse each conversion and reproduce the original files byte-for-byte, verified by checksums in the test suite. This means you can edit a sprite in any image editor and run your modified version. To play, clone the repository, run npm install inside the web folder, and open the local development URL in a browser. A URL parameter lets you fix the random seed so you get the same game every run, which is useful for testing. The project includes 93 automated tests and browser-based smoke tests using a tool called Playwright. The TypeScript code is released under the MIT license. The 1993 game data retains its original copyright.