Names in a hat game! Play in person or over a video call!
I built this game during my weekends in the first Covid lockdown in the UK so that I could play the game "Names in a hat" with my friends and family over video call.
It was an old family favourite game and we had tried playing with bits of paper but to be really successful all players need to have access to a single hat of names.
I decided it would be a fun little project to throw together a serverless React app that uses Firebase to persist data.
The first player creates a new game, this essentially creates a "room" for the players to join. The first player can then share the game code or a link that will automatically join the player to the game.
Each player then adds 5 well known names to the hat.
Once everyone has submitted their 5 names, the game starts and players take it in turns to describe as many names as possible to their team mates in 30s. The other team can time each turn using the built in 30s timer.
The frontend is a create-react-app React application. It uses @reach/router
for routing and bootstrap for styling.
The frontend is backed by Firebase Firestore a real-time, NoSQL hosted database solution. The frontend uses hooks that subscribe to changes made to the firestore collections. This way players see changes to the game happening in real-time on their screens.
The application is deployed to Netlify and the domain was acquired from google domains.