Phase 1 — Room/Mode Picker:
- New ludo-room scene with menu, setup, and searching views
- Player count picker (2/3/4 players)
- Bot/human distribution selector (1 human + N bots, 2 humans + N bots, etc)
- Bot difficulty picker (easy/medium/hard)
- Seat preview showing diagonal (2P) or skip-corner (3P) positioning
- Play table routes Ludo single/multi to the new room

Phase 2 — Social Features:
- Emote button (😄) in dice area opens full panel
- 8 emoji reactions + 6 preset Arabic phrases
- Emotes animate FROM the sender's player panel (speech bubble or floating emoji)
- Bot emotes on captures use the new bubble system
- Live mode emote transmission via mp.sendEmote
- 3-second cooldown between sends

Phase 3 — SFX Completion:
- sfx_dice_shake: during dice animation roll
- sfx_boost: rolling a 6 (extra turn excitement)
- sfx_piece_home: piece reaches center
- sfx_turn_start: your turn notification in live mode
- sfx_emote: sending/receiving social actions
- All new slots added to branding.php admin
- Synthesized fallbacks in audio.js for each new sound

Phase 4 — Multiplayer & Seat Mapping:
- rules.createGame accepts seats array for board-slot mapping
- 2-player = diagonal (Red vs Yellow), 3-player = skip Yellow
- boardSlot property on each player drives position/color/captures
- getPiecePosition/getHomeBasePosition use boardSlot not player index
- Game-over condition: numPlayers-1 finishers (not hardcoded 3)
- local-multi mode: multiple humans share one device, bots fill rest
- Turn rotation correctly skips only finished players
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>