Hacking together a quick multiplayer browser game to play during lockdown

This is a little web game I knocked together this week to play with friends during lockdown. We were looking for an easy to play simple version of Yatzy and all of the ones we were finding required linking your social media, going through long tutorials and had micro-transactions.

So I spent my evenings this week knocking together a simple multiplayer web app version to play.

And here's a link to what I created - Yatzy

Demo Video of Game

The philosophy of it

I was inspired by the CodeNames game you can play at horsepaste.com which is a simple easy to play implementation of the game. You just come up with a unique game code, and anyone who has that code can join.

I wanted that fast, just play, no sign ups experience.

On why I've called it Yatzy, its because Yatzy is a public domain game and Yahtzee is a Hasboro trademark.

The architecture

The rough architecture of the game looked like this.

Application Architecture Overview

Conclusions

I've been pretty pleased with the results. Nothing ground breaking, but a very playable experience.

I'll be doing more articles going forward about performance, some of the horrible hacks used to get it going and some reflections on what I learned. But for now if you want to have a play on the game you can do so here - Yatzy.