Web Game Night


TL;DR: I made a multiplayer game site to play Rook or Yahtzee with your friends virtually!

Like a lot of families, when mine gets together, we like to play games. One of the games we often play is Rook, a team-based card game played with a somewhat unique deck of cards. However, due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, we weren't going to be able to get together any time soon.

My brother-in-law (the one who usually organizes our Rook tournaments) suggested we find a way to play Rook online to give everyone something to do and stay connected. But after a couple minutes of Googling, I didn't find anything promising, and decided I could make my own. If nothing else, it would be a fun project to keep me busy while I was stuck at home. I spent the next few weeks building a game engine along with a quick and dirty web-based multiplayer interface, and kept working on various improvements until it turned into something I wouldn't be ashamed to have out in the world. I eventually decided to migrate my existing Yahtzee game to the same platform, making it multiplayer as well since that functionality had been broken for the last several years because of technology changes.

And so WebGameNight.com was born. I'll likely add more games in the future, but for the moment I'm more focused on moving what I have from "quick and dirty" to "good".

Tagged In: Yahtzee, Web Game Night