ExplainGame

Hello, PH! ExplainGame (explaingame.com) is a mobile-friendly party game for the whole family, that runs in the browser. The goal of the game is to get your teammates to say the words on your card before the timer runs out, using only word association clues. ExplainGame is like charades or Pictionary, but instead of acting or drawing, you have to use your words. For example, if you get a term like “Michael Schumacher,” you can say “F1 driver, Ferrari, ski accident” but not “Michael” or “Schumacher.” The game is a clone of a popular South African board game called 30 Seconds, or Articulate in the UK. It is meant to be played in-person. This mobile-friendly version solves the two main problems with 30 Seconds: - the cards get old over time, and - you don't always have it on you. In ExplainGame, each card is uniquely drawn from 700 answers to general knowledge questions in the free deck. The game is free to play, but in future you will be able to purchase expansion card decks @ $1.50 that will be category-specific, e.g. 80s Music, Rugby, Football, Formula 1, etc. Join a nearby game using geolocation or scan the host's QR code. You can share phones between teams by tapping "Add Player" to add local players. The game was built over 3 weekends in ~1,600 lines of Electric Clojure, backed by Datalevin (embedded Datomic). There exists no other tech stack today in which I could have built a real-time, multiplayer board game with this level of polish on such a short time frame. I can highly recommend Dustin Getz's Hytradboi talk on Electric Clojure (formerly Photon): https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/u... One current drawback is that sometimes a card may contain many terms from the same category like country names or famous people. In future, each card will draw terms from different categories. It is currently hosted on Fly.io across 3 regions (LAX, LHR & JNB). I am monitoring load to scale, but apologies if it falls over – I'm not sure how much load a ProductHunt launch will cause. If some players are using an eSIM on their phone, they may be routed to a different edge node and have a hard time joining (game data is sharded across regions). This will be fixed, but should be a rare occurrence. The game is dedicated to my late sister, Gesie Theron, who loved this game. Please play a few rounds with your family and send constructive feedback to explaingame@petrus.co.za, or follow @ExplainGameApp on Twitter for updates. Enjoy!