Showdown & Spectrum
Two live party games for three to eight players, played on phones around a room, built on a shared deck of more than 900 cards.
- Type
- Real-time multiplayer
- Built with
- React, Node.js, Socket.IO
- Features
- Rooms, wagers, AI players
- Live at
- bwian.org/showdown
The brief
A word-association party game that plays well whether you have three people or eight, works on whatever phones are in the room, and never makes anyone wait on a timer.
What we built
Showdown puts two clue-givers head to head on the same card. Clues go live as soon as they’re submitted, guessers get one shot, and wagers raise the stakes. Spectrum builds on it with a twelve-word board of colour bands, secret colour keys for each giver, and a rule that promotes the winning guesser into the clue-giver’s seat.
The deck behind it
Both games share a deck of more than 900 cards, so the content tooling mattered as much as the games. We built a swipe-based review deck for rating cards, a results view, a card editor and a cleanup bench, plus automatic validation that flags cards with problems before they reach a table.
Under the hood
- Authoritative game state on the server, pushed to every player over WebSockets.
- Short, unambiguous room codes, with rejoin after a dropped connection.
- AI clue-givers powered by Claude, with pre-written clues used where available.