Cat Dog Fish

The game everyone’s family plays on paper, except the arguing is now a formal procedure.

A wheel picks a letter. Everyone has the same list of categories, and a timer. Write an animal, a food, a boy’s name, a chocolate, whatever the host configured. Unique answers score 10. If somebody else wrote the same thing, you both get 5, which is the rule that makes the game interesting: the obvious answer is worth half as much as the one nobody else thought of.

The protest

The part I actually enjoyed building.

If the game rejects your answer you can protest it, and everyone else votes. It needs more than two thirds of the votes cast to stand. Abstentions do not count against you, so two people wandering off to make tea cannot sink a fair word, but a tie goes to the original ruling.

Words that survive a protest are written to a community dictionary that outlives the room, so a word won in one game is recognised in the next. It is kept deliberately separate from any official word list: “the table voted this in” and “this is in the dictionary” are different claims and should never be silently merged.

A successful protest triggers a full re-score of the round, not a patch to the protester’s line. That matters more than it sounds. Reinstating your answer can turn somebody else’s unique answer into a duplicate, and their score has to move too. Patching one row would quietly desync the scoreboard from the rules.

Architecture

One Durable Object per room holds the authoritative state, with a second shared object for the community dictionary. The server owns the clock, the letter, and every scoring decision, so nothing in the browser can change the outcome. Answers are not broadcast during a round, which is the difference between a game and an exercise in opening devtools.

Round timing runs on Durable Object alarms rather than client timers, so the round ends when the server says it does. WebSocket hibernation means an idle room costs nothing while it waits for someone to come back from the kitchen.

Rules that had to be decided

Small things that decide whether the game feels fair:

• Leading articles are ignored. “The Antelope” counts for A, not T. Otherwise every round has an argument in it.
• Accents fold. “Crème” and “Creme” are the same answer, so one player’s keyboard layout does not hand them a free 10 points.
• Invalid answers cannot form a duplicate group. If two people both write something that does not count, neither gets the duplicate score for matching.
• Empty is zero, never a penalty. Leaving a box blank is not the same as being wrong, and the optional penalty only applies to a real attempt.

Finishing first

Whoever fills their sheet first starts a short countdown for everyone else. Whatever is written when it ends still counts. It turns the end of a round into a scramble rather than a slow drift, and it is configurable, including off.

Everything else is configurable too: categories, round length, points, the penalty, which letters the wheel can land on, and whether a letter can repeat within a game.