Glass Bead Game

What is the Glass Bead Game and what is it for?

The Glass Bead Game is a game built as a Holochain app, published by Lightningrod Labs as an installable app rather than a website. It runs as a native desktop build, as a development launcher, or as an add-on inside the Moss and Weave group-workspace apps.

The Glass Bead Game is the name of a game, and Glass Bead Game is a working app that plays it on Holochain. The project comes from Lightningrod Labs, the studio whose other work includes Moss, an app that makes it easy for groups to form and assemble their own small set of shared tools, and the add-on apps that run inside those group spaces.

Three launch paths are documented. A developer can start native desktop windows with npm run start:tauri, start an Electron-based launcher with npm run start:electron, or run the game inside Moss or Weave with npm run start:moss. Each of those commands starts two local agents.

The game ships from the lightningrodlabs/glass-bead-game repository, where the README is the documentation: it covers entering the development shell, installing dependencies, the three launch commands, testing with tryorama and vitest, and packing the app into .happ and .webhapp bundles. No separate documentation site is linked from the repository.

From 4 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.