Name Place Animal Thing
The pen and paper word game, played live in a shared room. Everyone gets the same letter, fills the categories, and the room votes on which answers count. For groups who want a two minute game.
- Live
- iOS, Android
- 2025
- Full-stack engineering and design
The constraint
Everyone has played this on paper, and the fun is in the rush: a letter is called and everyone races to fill the grid. Moving it to a screen puts that rush at risk, because lag, an unfair letter or a clunky turn flow kills it instantly. The whole build was about protecting the feeling rather than adding to the game.
Decisions
- Letters are drawn weighted, not uniformly
- A weighted random draw favours letters people can actually build words from. It is a small detail that decides whether a round feels fair, which is the difference between playing again and putting the phone down.
- The room validates answers, not a dictionary
- Answers go to a quick peer vote. That keeps the game social and sidesteps arguments about edge-case words that no word list would settle to everyone's satisfaction.
What it does
- Solo play against ghost bots, with XP and levels
- Real-time multiplayer rooms over Socket.io
- Configurable categories, rounds and time limits
- Peer voting to validate answers in multiplayer
- Achievements, daily challenges and reveal-moment haptics
How it is built
- React Native (Expo)
- Node.js, Express and Socket.io
- MongoDB Atlas
- AWS EC2
- React Native · Expo · Node.js · Express · MongoDB · Socket.io