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I posted a response in a thread that had some applicable information to it, but it never got a response and I have questions, so this is sort of a re-post. I've created an HTML5 clone of a game I saw in a casino recently wherein players "grab" cards as they are dealt in order to reach a target score determined randomly before the game starts. I specifically created it to be played using physical buttons around a TV embedded into a table. I used the EaselJS APIs and I'm pretty happy with the results. The next level, so to speak, would be in allowing players to use their mobile devices to grab cards from a main play area (i.e. the TV). If you've played any of the Jackbox Party games, you'll know what I mean. I've gathered that in order to do this I'll need to leverage node.js and sockets.io to get players' mobile devices talking to the main game screen, but that's where my understanding ends. I don't really intend on releasing this to the public or anything, more for just me and my gambling friends, so I wan't to spend as little as possible, ideally nothing, on server usage. I've already setup a webserver in my home, strictly to serve internal IPs, using XAMMP on Windows. I created a basic node js server and I'm able to send messages back and forth, basically culling information from tutorials. What I'm looking for is how to best approach having players, using their mobile devices, interact with a separately rendered "main" screen. So, for example, the main screen displayed on the TV flips over a 10 of hearts. If a user wants that card, they tap a button on their device to add it to their hand. Unless I've missed my mark, the client (the player's mobile phone) sends a request to the node server, which then pings the main screen to give it info regarding which card is showing. While the main screen then locally stores that information into it's arrays (tracking players and their points), it sends a ping back to the server, which in turn sends a ping back to the client to animated the card image to their device and updates a score display. Do I have all that right or is there some far easier way to do this? I can't have the node server file the same as the main screen because it doesn't know how to process any of the other stuff going on, but I could be wrong. How do I tell the node server to get the card value from the main table and send it back to the client in one elegant function? There are other things I need to do, but this is the central piece to the entire project.