Playtest (Scrabble edition)

Inspiration

50 years of collective experience playing videogames, board games, and games of all kinds. Games engage us, inspire us, and give us a reason to stick around when we otherwise might not.

What it does

Playtest (Scrabble edition) is a single JS script import that turns any website into a fun Scrabble-inspired minigame. Users can play to earn points with longer and more relevant words. These points rank all users who play any Playtest game across all client sites in a competition to earn the most points in order to qualify for the top 3 grand prizes.

How we built it

To turn words into Scrabble letters: randomization functions and scrabblify styling. Point calculation functions using Scrabble rules. Validation function for the guess word using Scrabble's 2019 dictionary, formatted into a JSON pickle. Claude to apply a bonus multiplier layer if the guess word was relevant to the website's context. (Note: pre-designed components, but needed adaptation for this project) an informational sidebar on Playtest that pops up once you've completed the game

Challenges we ran into

Claude is a bit more finnicky to work with than other LLMs we're used to, but the token limit made it an incredibly versatile one for the use case of ingesting total site content. We had to really be careful about how we were prompting Claude to get rule-based outputs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finishing the v1 of this in 5 hours! The rest was cleanup and making sure the user experience was airtight.

What we learned

The entire hackathon participation was structured as a learning experience. My (Alex) three other teammates are all students in a Product Engineering bootcamp I've been guiding them through to learn how to build products, from ideation to implementation.

I'm so proud of the team for coming together to build some really impressive work, especially considering that they still have so much untapped potential in their skills and creativity!

What's next for Playtest (Scrabble edition)

We want customers! We're ready to deploy Playtest mini-games on any website that needs to find interesting ways to engage their audiences or userbases.

Built With

• claude
• css
• fastapi
• figma
• html
• javascript
• python