Alternatives
Products that do what Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game online does
Three weeks ago GHQ, a strategy board created by Kurt Vonnegut appeared on the front of HN[0]. A friend and I got hooked and spent the last week and half building out a playable online version of the game. It supports pass n'play, multiplayer, and a primitive bot (named kurt) that you can play against. We're also chess nerds so had to ship with an Elo system. Huge kudos to nicolodavis[1] and the maintainers of Boardgame.io [2] - it's the only reason we could build something this good, this fast. The library separates concerns and authority across the server / client seamlessly without…
- 1MA
A few months ago (82 days to be exact!) I posted a link on HN to my game, Meatshields. A bunch of you commented and played my game and gave me some wonderful feedback. Over the last few months I've been playing with many of you and implementing the best of everybody's suggestions. So, thank you, HN for all your help! I feel this is an extreme overhaul I couldn't have done without your input. Since then, I have: Dramatically improved our hosting platform (So it HOPEFULLY won't go down this time (oops.)), Added two new units, Rebalanced all existing units, Added many more maps, Improved the…
2017
- 2WF
2014 · github.com
- 3FO
Hello HN, I have started FBG some years ago when I moved to the Bay Area and could not find a simple, cross-platform, no-registration way to play board games with my friends back in my home country. I also wanted to make it simple to create multiplayer board games online for developers in their free time. Shortly after, I found out about boardgame.io with similar goals and decided to join forces with them. It became the engine of our board games, and we focused on publishing/serving them. To be fair with everyone and inspired by Wikipedia, we made the project a non-profit with GPLv3…
2021
- 4
- 5IB
Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world
- 6HH
I built a satirical browser game to share with friends (Hormuz Havoc: you play an American president managing a crisis in the Middle East, only "loosely" inspired by current events). I had good fun making this, but that's not necessarily the interesting part. The interesting part was that within a few hours of sharing it with my friends, some of them set about trying to overrun the leaderboard by launching a swarm of AI bots to learn the game and figure out how to get the highest score. This set off a game of cat-and-mouse as they found vulnerabilities and I tried patching them. Within hours…
Apr 2026 · hormuz-havoc.com
- 7NB
We at Semicolon Developers have released two player version of Nepali board game Baghchal[1]. It can be played at: http://obaghchal.com Game is working fine in Chrome and Firefix latest builds. There are few glitches but if you have ever played Baghchal I'd love to hear your feedback on the game play online. I'd like to credit HN for all the encouragement. I have promised myself to post a Show HN thread with some cool work and this is our first attempt. Deployment wise I am having some difficulties in setting up server. I think we'd have problem scaling it up. If any Nepali hacker is…
2012
- 8
- 9HM
Hello HN, I recently built a hangman game called Hangin' Man! It's just a weekend project, nothing crazy, but I'd been wanting to create this for ages out of frustration with the lack of decent hangman games out there. I love playing word games - I regularly play Wordle, Skribbl, you name it. But hangman was my favourite game growing up. I'm really disappointed by the hangman options available online. Most of them look like they're from the 2000s and use kindergarten-level words. So this is my attempt at making "the hangman game" for the internet. It has a competitive mode for word geeks and…
2025 · hanginman.xyz
- 10BG
Tl;dr: Would like to hear thoughts on board games platform prototype (https://bordga.me/games/7) We are building an online board games platform which lets you create & play any board game online while video chatting with your co-players. Game play resembles the real world where users have to do everything from moving the pieces to enforcing the rules. We are quite early in our journey. We prototyped Chess to see if people would be interested in this direction. Please try it here! (https://bordga.me/games/7) You can enter your name that creates a new…
2021
- 11GA
I wanted to learn more about RAG implementations, so I built something to solve the constant digging through manuals whenever we play a game. It's fairly simplistic, but actually has worked pretty well for some of these conflicts. Everythings Open Source on GitHub if you're curious (or have ideas), and I'd love to hear feedback from fellow boardgamers!
2024 · gamegame.ai
- 12IB
I haven't seen anything like this so I decided to build it in a weekend. How it works: You see a bunch of things pulled from Wikipedia displayed on cards. You ask yes or no questions to figure out which card is the secret article. The AI model has access to the image and wiki text and it's own knowledge to answer your question. Happy to have my credits burned for the day but I'll probably have to make this paid at some point so enjoy. I found it's not easy to get cheap+fast+good responses but the tech is getting there. Most of the prompts are running through Groq infra or hitting a cache…
Apr 2026 · sleuththetruth.com
- 13CS
2016 · github.com
- 14GI
2021 · gamesroom.io
- 15IB
Hi HN, here is my humble weekend project. I couldn’t find any similar utilities online that would let me download all of my chess games, so I decided to make one. It’s definitely imperfect, so please let me know if you have any feedback!
2023 · chessgamedownloader.fly.dev
- 16SE
Hey, I've shared this game while it was still a work in progress in one of the Tell HN threads. I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people tried it, and I got some positive feedback and constructive criticism. Anyway, I found a gamedev library I really like - Kaplay [1]. What I like about it is that easy things are easy. Meaning I could have fun building the game without learning (or fighting) a new tool. I always wanted to make games, but this is the first one I actually did. And I have to tell you - game development sparks joy! It combines so many things (game design, programming,…
Jan 2026 · muffinman-io.itch.io
- 17M4
Well HN, I've finally produced something I think is worthy of sharing, but I didn't do it "in a weekend". Yeah, it's an iOS puzzle game. And yeah, it's a game I built because I wanted to play it rather than based on market research, so all this sort of makes it the antithesis of a popular HN post. But whatever. Still hoping for some of that patented (har har) expert HN feedback. Critique any part of it except the music. Also, PM me for upgrade codes, or I can post some here if there's any interest. Download (it's free):…
2012
- 18IM
Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz
2022 · wheredle.xyz
- 19IM
http://codewords.io/ I've been trying to get permission to run a game of it from the publisher and designer (CGE & Vlaada Chvátil) but I haven't heard back. I've found demonstrating that there's interest in what you're doing is the best way to get ahold of people. So.. Anyone interested in trying a massive game of Codenames over Twitch? Not quite "For Science!" more "For Engineering!" Which, let's be honest here, has a much better ring to it. If you'd like to know more, I put up an FAQ up here: http://codewords.io/faq/ If you'd like to sign up to help,…
2017
- 20HA
I'm building a manually curated catalog of games made by the HN community. I'v found several small gems while browsing HN, and it would've been quite difficult to find those games otherwise. So I've started a personal quest to collect those games into a public catalog with open source code and open data (everything is available on GitHub: https://github.com/labarilem/hn-games). Currently the collection has data up to the end of 2022. The plan, of course, is to gather all data up to today and then keep updating the collection. I've published this early version of the…
2025 · hackernews.games
- 21FA
Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com
- 22PC
Built this with my roommate over the weekend. At the end of the game, GPT will share its reasoning for each choice, which yields some funny results and explains why its so hard to win. Enjoy!
2023 · codenames-with-gpt.netlify.app
- 23WM
Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
2014
- 24AC
Hello, This is something I've wanted to build for awhile (first bought the domain in 2020 (then lost it for a year+)). It's a tactics solver on each new tab page. There are 5 modes of play: Easy (<1200 elo) Medium (1200-1800) Hard (1800-2400) Expert (2400+) Speedrun (solve as many puzzles as possible in 60 seconds). I'm having a ton of fun with it, and definitely noticing improvements with actual games (definitely solved the most puzzles in my life while developing this extension). If you check it out, please let me know what you think. Any feedback is good!
Apr 2026 · leetchess.com
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