Spinlings

Spinlings is a creature card game that plays above the Claude Code prompt. While Claude works, wild pixel creatures turn up in a slim band and your team of three fights them on its own. Win and you may catch one. It makes no model calls and adds nothing to Claude’s context, so it costs zero tokens.

What it does

• Battles while Claude works. Once Claude’s main turn has run 20 seconds, every further 15 seconds has a chance of bringing a wild creature, at most once every 8 minutes. Rounds take 2.2 seconds and play themselves. When your creature’s special fires, pressing 1 in that round makes it a Perfect hit. If Claude finishes first, the battle plays on.
• No losses, no grind. You never lose a card in battle: a fainted one rests for 15 minutes. Rewards are fixed per battle, so long turns and heavy use earn nothing extra.
• One-of-a-kind cards. Every card has its own colours, genes and traits, and evolves at levels 4 and 8. Packs charge with time while Claude Code is open, idle time included, up to 12 waiting. Fusion merges two cards into a new hybrid.
• Other players. Duel other players’ saved teams near your rating, trade, gift, sell on a market for sparks (the game’s currency, which cannot be bought or cashed out) and climb the leaderboards. When no real player fits, generated Rivals take the duel and a Wandering Trader offers a few deals a day, so the game works alone.
• One command. /spin opens a pane with Team, Collection, Discoveries and Community tabs. A Spinlings button beside the prompt hint (terminal) or the session modes (Desktop) opens it too, with a dot when a pack is ready. Subcommands such as /spin battle, /spin trade <handle> and /spin quiet are listed in the README.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later. In Claude Desktop’s Code tab, the app’s bundled Claude Code has to meet that version too; updating the CLI does not update it.

claude plugin marketplace add 416rehman/spinlings
claude plugin install spinlings@spinlings

Start a new session and run /spin. You begin with a team of three, two welcome packs and 100 sparks. /spin quiet silences the game, and /spin sound on turns on its chimes, which are off by default.

How it works

Spinlings has two kinds of world, and the difference matters for privacy.

• Online (the default). According to the README, the mod joins https://spinlings.dev, the author’s server, by itself on first run. There is no sign-up: you get a random token and a generated handle such as soft-otter-42. Requests carry game data only: session, card and pack ids, team choices, the rounds where you pressed 1, and the model family (haiku, sonnet, opus or fable) when you join, a pack charges or a battle starts. The server rolls every card and decides every battle. The author states it keeps no IP addresses or request logs.
• Offline. /spin world offline switches to an independent save on your machine that sends nothing. Each world keeps its own collection, and switching deletes neither. If the server is unreachable on first run, you start offline.
• Community servers. Anyone can run the open-source server. /spin world <https-url> moves you to one after a one-time notice, and the same game data then goes to that host. Plain http is allowed only for localhost and 127.0.0.1.

Other players see your handle, team, league, listings, game stats and the cards you mark for trade. They never see when you play or which model you use. /spin leaderboard off hides you from the boards. /spin privacy lists the last 20 requests the mod sent and deletes your online account. A passkey, saved from /spin devices, is optional and lets you open the collection on another computer or in the browser; without one, losing every device loses the online account.

On your machine, the mod reads only the rhythm of the session: that a turn started or ended, the model and effort level, rate-limit percentages, compaction and the arguments of /spin. It does not hook tool.call or prompt.submit, and it never reads prompts, answers, files, paths or cost. Session and turn hooks pass their events straight on and never wait for the network. Settings, the offline save and each world’s session live in the plugin’s own storage.

Limitations

• Wild creatures only appear while Claude’s main turn runs. The server spaces battles at least 8 minutes apart for wild encounters and 2 minutes for duels.
• Online play depends on the author’s server. If it is down, Claude Code works as usual and the pane shows your collection as last loaded.
• New seasons arrive from the server without reinstalling, but the author notes that new screens or creature families may need a mod update.