The Marquee Only Shows One Game at a Time

Old picture houses only ever had one film up on the marquee at a time, even when they had more reels sitting in the storeroom. I liked that idea enough to build the homepage around it — one game gets the featured slot, lit up and given the best position on the page, while the rest sit quietly in the full list below.

It's a small constraint but it does a lot of work. Instead of the homepage turning into a grid of two dozen equally loud tiles, there's a single clear starting point. If you've got five minutes, you don't have to choose from everything, you can just take whatever's currently on the marquee and go.

Picking what goes up there isn't scientific. Sometimes it's whichever game got the most recent bit of polish, sometimes it's just a change of pace after a run of card games, sometimes it's simply what I feel like playing myself that week. There's no leaderboard or popularity count driving the choice.

A few people have asked whether the featured slot rotates on a fixed schedule. It doesn't, on purpose — a picture house doesn't swap films at the exact same hour every single week either. It changes when it changes, which keeps it feeling like a real decision rather than a countdown timer.

The rest of the games haven't gone anywhere in the meantime, obviously. The marquee is just a spotlight, not a gate — everything is still one click away in the full list, whether or not it's had its turn under the bulbs recently.