Do the bots see my cards?

No. Opponent bots play from their own hand and the cards that have been played in public. The partner bot can use hidden information only to decide its own bid, and to check whether a trick is already won.

How do you test the bots?

The engine is plain C# with no game engine dependency. A test harness plays thousands of full games, and any illegal play or exception fails the run.

Can a bot see the cards in my hand?

No. A bot plays from its own hand and the cards that have been shown on the table.

Not by breaking the rules. Every bid is backed by cards the bot really holds, so a bot never claims a hand it cannot make.

What does a fair bot mean?

A bot that follows every rule, uses only information a player would have, and never reads hidden cards.

What do I do if I think a bot cheated?

Email support@xtroverllc.com with a short description of the hand and what you saw. We read every report.

How we built 29 bots that never cheat

A card game against bots lives or dies on one question: do I trust them? Players forgive a bot that plays a weak card. They do not forgive a bot that plays a card it should not be allowed to play, or wins a hand it could only have won by looking at yours. When we built 29 Royale we treated that trust as a specification, not a hope.

Rule one: the bot goes through the same door as you

In 29 the legal plays are not always obvious. You must follow suit if you can. Before the trump is revealed you may not trump. After the reveal you may trump only when you cannot follow suit. The seventh card stays locked until the reveal. A marriage can be declared only after a trick is won.

Each of those checks lives in one place in the game, and a human player's taps go through it. Our rule was simple: the bot's plays go through the same check. A bot has no separate, looser path. If the bot's choice fails the legality check, the game logs an error, reports it as a non-fatal problem, and plays a legal card instead. In practice that fallback has not fired in a shipped build, because of the testing described below.

Rule two: thousands of games before any change ships

The bot engine is plain C# with no game-engine dependency. That was deliberate. A small console program can compile the same source files and play games as fast as the processor allows. The harness runs several modes:

Soak. Thousands of random full games. Any illegal play or exception fails the run.
Scenarios. Hand-built positions with the play we expect, so a strategy change cannot quietly break a known good decision.
Audit. Counts common mistakes, such as failing to support a partner or wasting a point card, so we can tell whether a change made the bots smarter or only different.
Duel. The honest bot against a greedy bot that is allowed to see every card, on identical deals. The honest bot should still win a fair share of games, or its strategy is weak.
Bids. Bidding accuracy by seat, to stop the bots overcalling.

The soak run is the gate. A change that produces one illegal play in eighty thousand tricks does not ship.

The path every bot play takes. The check is the same one a human's tap goes through.

Rule three: define honest precisely

"The bots don't cheat" is a slogan. We needed a definition, and ours is narrow.

Opponent bots play from their own hand and the public history of the hand. How much hidden information they may use during bidding is a tunable setting, and it ships at its fair value.
The partner bot may use hidden information for two things only: deciding its own bid, and, when the "partner secures sure tricks" option is on, checking whether a trick is already won before it feeds the trick a point card. It never uses hidden information to choose an illegal card, and never to read your hand.

Those two allowances exist because a partner who bids blindly makes the game miserable, and a partner who feeds a point card into a trick that is about to be trumped is no fun to sit across from. Everything else is off limits.

What the bots are good at

Difficulty changes how aggressive a bot is, not whether it follows the rules. On Hard, the bots fight for the contract against a team sitting at +4 or +5, double a caller who has reached +5, redouble with the score in mind, and reveal the trump sooner when they are long in it. They also talk, with emoji and voice lines. That has nothing to do with honesty, and everything to do with the game feeling alive.

Why it matters

A card game you can play offline is a card game you will play on a plane, where you cannot complain to anyone. Every hand has to feel fair, because nobody is watching. 29 Royale is free on Google Play. The bots are the first thing we test on every change.