Inspiration
You can talk to someone online for an hour and never learn the simplest things about where they're from. Not the capital or the flag — what time they eat dinner, which way their light switches flip. Those details are where cultures actually differ, and nobody mentions them because everyone assumes their version is just how the world works.
What it does
Two players are matched. Each secretly picks a culture. You take turns asking from twenty-five questions across food, daily life, geography and culture, and race to guess where the other person is from.
Easy mode adds a clickable map for eliminating countries. Sixty seconds per turn. Wins go to a leaderboard, so fewer questions is better.
How we built it
Game state lives on the server — pairing, turns, questions asked. The frontend polls to keep both players in sync. Questions sit in a JSON file grouped by category, so content could be rewritten all night without touching code. Matchmaking, turn logic and scoring are ours. Deployed on Render.
Challenges we ran into
Git nearly ate us — divergent histories, an accidental force push, and "refusing to merge unrelated histories" at midnight. We backed up, re-cloned and copied our work back in.
Turn-based state across two browsers took more iterations than anything else.
And our first questions were basically trivia. The ones that worked were the ones nobody thinks are interesting about themselves.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It's live and two strangers can play it right now. The map, difficulty modes, timer and leaderboard were all stretch goals we expected to cut.
What we learned
None of us had built anything with two people interacting live. Keeping shared state consistent was a genuinely new problem. We also learned that content isn't a side task — twenty-five good questions did more for this than any feature.
What's next for CultureGuessr
Player-submitted questions, so the set improves as more cultures contribute.
A better ending: show both players' answers side by side and highlight what they had in common, so the payoff is recognising something shared rather than just winning.
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