jury doody

lobby screen
game 1: verdict
game 2: guess the outcome
final screen
game 2: guess the outcome
game 3: debate

Inspiration

Our team, like many others, has fallen into the rabbit hole of minecraft parkour tiktoks and podcasts that rehash r/AITA stories. And as much as we love rotting in bed to them, we also think all the stories are way more fun to judge when you're not alone. So, we wanted to turn the whole experience into a game, so friends can debate the stories together, out loud, in the same room.

What it does

jury doody is a Jackbox-style party game. One laptop hosts, and everyone else joins on their phone with a 4-letter room code. The room judges AITA stories as the facts are revealed piece by piece, with three modes:

Verdict: The story is narrated paragraph by paragraph. Vote YTA or NTA, and change your mind any time. The earlier you lock in the right answer, the more points you get.
Guess the Outcome: Write a fake "UPDATE:" from the poster, then try to spot the real one among everyone's fakes.
Debate: One player controls what the room learns by highlighting text from the story. Blind presenters argue for or against OP while the jury votes, reacts, and watches a live YTA vs NTA battle bar swing.

It all comes wrapped in an old-Reddit look, with AI narration, a rolling comment feed, a results graph, and a leaderboard with awards.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js and React, with Recharts for the results graph.
Backend: A Node server with Socket.IO that owns all game state. Phones send intents and the server broadcasts the state back.
Narration: ElevenLabs. Titles and paragraphs are pre-generated, and Debate highlights are spoken live and cached.
Data: An offline pipeline that filters AITA posts, strips spoiler edits, and uses the Claude API to condense stories into short paragraphs. Every story was hand-reviewed for safety.

Challenges we ran into

Spoilers: Edits and updates in the original posts often gave away the verdict, so we had to clean the data carefully.
Debate's live reveal: Making highlighting work on both laptop and phone, while keeping presenters blind and the host screen in sync.
Fair scoring: Rewarding early votes without making the live battle bar a free answer key.
Parallel building: Four people and agents working at once without clashing, in under 12 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Three game modes running on a single round engine.
A live reveal system where the story fills in as it's narrated and highlighted.
Story content that's cleaned, condensed, and reviewed for safety.
A game that actually feels fun to play together.

What we learned

Lock the contracts first, then parallelize. Agents work best with clear boundaries.
Hidden information is what makes a social game fun.
The live battle bar made the room much louder and more competitive.