I built Gokab, a daily word game for picking up vocabulary in a new language. Everyone in the world gets the same puzzle each day, and it resets at midnight UTC, so you can compare scores with friends or against everyone else. One wrong tap ends the game. The idea came from traveling and living in places where I didn't speak the language well. I wanted something more game-like and competitive than flashcard apps: a daily puzzle I can do in a couple of minutes and also play friends on. It's free, no ads, no subscription, no account needed to play. Sign up (also free) and you get a daily revive; there's an optional $1 pack of 3 revives if you want more. That's the only thing you can buy. Here's the tech stack I used: Rails 8, Hotwire, SQLite in production. The whole run generates and validates in the browser from a server-issued daily seed, so it plays offline and the server mostly just ships a seed and a ~90KB word bank. I deploy it using Kamal on a Hetzner box. There's no LLM in the answer path. The word banks are generated offline by a Python pipeline and frozen, so checking an answer is set membership against a fixed list. That is what makes two players on the same day get an identical game. Would love feedback on the game design and the difficulty curve especially. What breaks, what's confusing, what's too easy or too hard!

Gokab

A daily vocab game in 4 languages, everyone gets same words

A daily vocab game in 4 languages, everyone gets same words