The story
Sc. 01 · the brief
The name is Ivan plus monopol.
The brief, in its own words: a personal site shaped like a Monopoly board, almost creepy. It replaced a throwaway brainstorm with a total rebuild. The rule from day one: blank means blank, and nothing is invented to fill a gap.
Sc. 02 · what we built
Roll twice and you fall through.
A 40-square board with Chance and Community Chest decks of 16 cards each, a top-hat token and squares that open as cards. You get one roll. Roll again and the board warps into a black hole, swallows the Monopoly man and comes out the other side as a black-and-green ASCII console. It is not a theme switch; it is what happens to you for rolling again.
Sc. 03 · how we built it
Nothing is a magic pixel value.
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript modules, no build step, on Cloudflare Pages. Forty squares sit on an 11-by-11 grid, and the whole board is sized from one value, so it rescales exactly. Both boards read the same content file, so nothing is written twice, and each of the eight colour groups gets its own dither pattern on the far side, where there is only green.
Sc. 04 · the detail
The hole is never a clean circle.
The crossing copies the board into a grid of characters on a canvas and eats it: no orbits, no glow, no accretion disc. The shading runs through a ramp of characters broken up by a 4×4 dither, and the edge of the hole is the noise. It was cut from six seconds to 1.7, and the hat is the last thing to go.
Sc. 05 · where it stands
Launched unfinished: 31 of 66 written.
All seven commits fall on one day, 16 August 2026, and the board became the home page that evening. It went live unfinished, with 31 of its 66 slots written and the rest left blank rather than invented. Still undecided: what corner 30 should be, the unwritten stations, utilities and taxes, and which squares link out to other sites.