Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code
Wordbots is a long-running side project I've been working on on-and-off for the past ~7 years that I finally feel comfortable enough with to share with the HN community. It's an online tactical card game (inspired by games like Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering), where players write their own cards in natural language, that gets parsed down to JavaScript. The English-to-JavaScript translation is handled by a semantic parser operating on a hand-crafted CCG grammar – kind of an “old-school” approach in this age of LLMs but one that performs quite well on the very constrained language of…
In plain words
Wordbots is an online tactical card game where players write custom cards in natural language that are automatically translated into executable code. Inspired by games like Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering, it uses a semantic parser with a hand-crafted grammar to convert English card descriptions to JavaScript. Players can create unique cards that produce unpredictable gameplay, with various formats available including balanced modes and draft options.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Wordbots is a long-running side project I've been working on on-and-off for the past ~7 years that I finally feel comfortable enough with to share with the HN community. It's an online tactical card game (inspired by games like Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering), where players write their own cards in natural language, that gets parsed down to JavaScript. The English-to-JavaScript translation is handled by a semantic parser operating on a hand-crafted CCG grammar – kind of an “old-school” approach in this age of LLMs but one that performs quite well on the very constrained language of Wordbots cards. The resulting game gets pretty wacky as players can create all sorts of cards, though there are some game formats that try to produce more balanced gameplay as well (e.g. one format in which both players shuffle their decks together, and various draft formats). If you're curious about how it all works, I made a write-up about it here: https://app.wordbots.io/how-it-works And if you want to chat about Wordbots beyond this thread, please don't hesitate to join our discord at https://discord.wordbots.io/ . I'd love to hear any and all feedback. -Alex
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