Harry's Bar Quick Start

You're a colored smiley in a picture of a bar. Other people are the other smileys. Everything here is text and pictures; there is no audio and never will be.

• Moving
• Talking
• Faces
• Balloon tricks
• Whispering
• Your look
• Closed eyes
• From Discord
• Harry
• Painting
• Wheel of Cheese

Moving around

Click anywhere in the picture and your head jumps there. No walking, no animation, no fences; that's how the original Palace worked too. Stand near someone to talk to them, sit on the bar, hang from the chandelier. Your spot is remembered, so you'll be standing in the same place next time you come in.

Talking

Type in the box at the bottom and press Enter. Your words appear in a balloon next to your head. They stay in the bar: nothing you say here is posted to the Discord channel, though the pinned picture of the room shows your balloons to anyone looking. Balloons stay up longer for longer messages, at least three seconds. Say something else while your balloon is still up and, if there is room below it, the new line hangs underneath as a second bubble on the same stem; when the first fades, the second moves up to take its place. When there isn't room, the new line waits its turn. ↑ and ↓ in the box recall what you've said, like a shell.

The 💬 button opens a transcript to the left of the picture: everything said out loud, Harry's lines, whispers you were part of, and who came and went, with times. It's kept in your browser only, and it records what people typed, not the word-swap gag if one is on.

Messages are capped at 250 characters.

Changing your face with emoticons

Start a message with one of these and your face changes before you speak. The emoticon itself is not shown. You can also use one on its own, just to change your face without saying anything.

So :)hello smiles and says "hello", and :( by itself just looks sad. A few faces have no emoticon (Blotto, Tilt up, Tilt down, Wink right); pick those from the look picker.

Balloon tricks

A different first character changes the balloon instead of the face. These can be combined with each other and with an emoticon, in any order.

Whispering

Click someone's head and the input box switches to whisper mode: their name appears next to it and the text turns italic. Whatever you type now goes only to the two of you, in an italic balloon. Whispers are never posted to Discord.

Press Esc, click the floor, or click their head again to stop whispering. If someone whispers to you, your box switches to whisper mode back to them so you can just reply.

You can't whisper to a head with closed eyes. They aren't in the bar, so they wouldn't hear it.

Your look

The ☺ button at the bottom right opens the look picker.

Face

Twelve expressions, drawn in your current color, including the ones with no emoticon. (The thirteenth, the gritted-teeth angry face, is emoticon-only: :[.)

Color

Ten colors: red, orange, yellow, lime, green, teal, sky, blue, purple, magenta. Your balloons are tinted to match, so people can tell at a glance who said what.

Props

Party hat, martini, sunglasses, pirate hat, halo, bow tie, mustache, crown, cigarette, wine bottle, beer, hand of cards, top hat, bunny ears. Most are the original 1995 Palace props. Wear up to nine at once; click one to put it on, click again to take it off. Props draw in the order you put them on.

Heads with closed eyes

A head with its eyes shut is someone who is talking in the Discord channel but hasn't opened the bar. Their messages still show up as white balloons, so you can read along, but they can't see you, can't move, and can't be whispered to. The moment they open the bar, their eyes open and they wake up right where they were standing.

Eyes also close if someone in the bar hasn't touched anything for twenty minutes. Any click or keystroke opens them again. A closed-eyed head disappears fifteen minutes after its last Discord message.

From the Discord side

You don't need the bar open to be part of it. Anything you post in the bar's channel appears in the room as a balloon from your closed-eyed head, and the people inside can answer you, though their answers stay in the room. Emoticons and balloon prefixes work from Discord too.

The channel has a pinned message with a live picture of the room, refreshed within about twenty seconds of anything changing, plus an "Enter" button. That picture is how the channel sees the bar. Two slash commands do the same on demand, visibly only to you: /palace shows the picture and the link, /palace-who lists who's awake, who's dozing, and who has their eyes closed.

Harry, the man in the painting

The bar has a host. Say his name in a sentence, Harry, what's good tonight?, and a balloon answers from the portrait behind the bar. He has no head to click and never posts to Discord; his balloons are white with a gold rim so you can tell them from a person's. Three dots under the painting mean he's composing.

He's a barkeep, not an oracle: dry, brief, and he'll tell you when something is beyond the painting's reach. Once he's answered you, you're in conversation: for the next minute or two your lines reach him without his name, so "who's there?" works. End a line with over, radio style, and he'll answer that one but then leave you alone until you say his name again. After two replies to lines that didn't use his name he drops out of the conversation on his own. And if you tell him to be quiet, hush, pipe down, or that you're busy or playing, he says nothing at all and stays out of it for ten minutes, or until someone says his name. He answers each person about once every twenty seconds otherwise, and knocks off for the day when his tab runs out. You can whisper to him by clicking the portrait; he whispers back.

Only barkeeps, people with the server's host role, can direct him. When a barkeep asks, Harry can redecorate: Harry, turn the bar into a spaceship, Harry, put up a banner that says Trivia Night, Harry, use the word replacement gag (the original 1995 list, where "computer" comes out "the evil empire"; only balloons change, Discord sees what you typed), or Harry, give Ada a badge that says Champion. He has twenty original Palace rooms to choose from, a small library of images, and can draw signs and shapes. Anyone else asking gets a friendly no.

In the bar he's a voice from the portrait. In every other room he has a body: a small square portrait that stands on the floor, square on purpose so you can tell he's a bot. Barkeeps can drag him out of the way, and each room remembers where he was last put. He can also walk himself if asked.

For game nights the bar keeps the honest parts: Harry can put up a scoreboard, run a timer that everyone sees, roll dice on the table, and open a poll you vote in by clicking an option. He never invents a roll or a score; the bar does those, he narrates. Ask a barkeep: "Harry, let's do trivia, players are Ada and Bram, 30 seconds a question."

Chess and backgammon are furniture, not referees, the way the original's game rooms were. Harry, set up chess (or checkers, or backgammon) switches to the board picture with the original Palace piece art in place; everyone in the room drags pieces, drops snap to squares or points, a chess piece dropped on an occupied square sends the occupant to the side, and there are no rules at all. Pieces, boards, and panels sit under people, so a spare checker never covers a face; a head under the pointer takes the click before a piece does. Play by whatever rules you agree on; ask Harry to roll for backgammon. Harry, reset the board, flip the board, clear the board, and take the board down do what they say.

He also runs hangman: Harry, let's play hangman puts a board up (he picks the phrase and keeps it to himself; the bar draws the gallows and blanks). While a game is on, anything anyone says in the room counts as a guess, a letter or the whole phrase, so you don't need his name. Harry, take the board down ends it.

Changing the room opens "the floor," a session that ends when a barkeep says Harry, stop or reset, when the barkeep leaves, or after twenty quiet minutes. Ending it puts the bar back exactly as it was.

Painting on the room

The original Palace let you draw right on the picture, and so does this. When you're allowed to paint, a ✎ button appears next to the chat box. Click it and a strip of tools opens: the sixteen Palace colors plus black and white, a pen size from 1 to 8, and an "in front" switch that puts your strokes over people's heads instead of behind them. Drag on the picture to draw; a click without a drag still moves you. undo takes back your own last stroke. clear wipes everything, barkeeps only.

By default barkeeps can paint any time and everyone else can't. A barkeep can open it up: Harry, let's use the whiteboard moves everyone to Valhalla, the room with the big blank screen, and hands out markers to all. Harry can look at the board and tell you what he sees, which is what Pictionary will be built on. When the floor closes, the board is wiped.

Wheel of Cheese

The bar's own game show, ported from the 1996 Palace bot: Ratbot hosts, and Bananna turns the letters on a board of tiles in the top left corner: she walks along the foot of the board, turns each lit tile as she reaches it, and waits at the far side for the next one. A yellow sign beside the board carries the category and Ratbot's prompt. A barkeep starts it with Harry, let's play Wheel of Cheese or /harry play in Discord. Everyone in the room is in; say out if you'd rather watch and play to get back in. Ratbot takes turns around the room and tells you when you're up. The wheel itself is a spiky card in the top right corner. If you can't see the board, open the transcript (💬): every change to the board is written there as text, with blanks as underscores, and a screen reader hears the same.

On your turn, just talk. Plain English works too: "I wanna spin", "I'd like to buy a vowel", "is there an S?", "gimme a T", "I'll solve it", "I pass", and his name in front or behind doesn't hurt. The short forms:

Three rounds, then the player with the most winnings plays the final: the sign shows the puzzle with R S T L N E filled in, you give three consonants and a vowel on one line, and then you have forty seconds on the clock to type the answer. Win and the grand prize is yours. The top ten winnings for the room are kept. Cheese is not redeemable for anything. A barkeep's Harry, stop or reset ends the game early, and barkeeps can drag Ratbot out of the way like Harry.

Chat at Ratbot (Ratbot, is that a toupee?, or anything mentioning rat, spud, or Bananna) and Harry answers in Ratbot's voice, from Ratbot's head, on Harry's usual budget and cooldown. Neither of them will help you with the puzzle. When the game closes, a caption credits the artist: Ratbot and Bananna were drawn in 1997 by Lisa Herschbach, one of the original Palace wizards.

Captions. Now and then a square cream box appears with nobody's name on it: "Meanwhile, in Harry's Bar…" when the room comes back from a game or another picture, the art credit, or a dry aside from Harry. That's the narrator, the comics kind. It's not a person talking, and the transcript shows it without a name.

Odds and ends

The bar holds twenty people. If it's full you'll be told, and a stool opens when someone leaves. Closed-eyed heads don't count.

Reloading the page keeps your seat: the bar waits thirty seconds for you before it decides you've left.

Log in is through Discord. Only members of the bar's Discord server who can see its channel can get in.