Pull in Viget posts
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David Eisinger
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---
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title: "What’s in a Word? Building a Verbose Party Game"
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date: 2023-05-25T00:00:00+00:00
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draft: false
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canonical_url: https://www.viget.com/articles/whats-in-a-word-building-a-verbose-party-game/
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---
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Fun group party game. Somehow incorporate AI. Build it quickly. These
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were the constraints we put on our mostly Colorado-based Pointless Corp.
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team before [Pointless
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Palooza](https://www.viget.com/articles/the-enduring-point-of-pointless-corp/).
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A few of us wanted to partake in the old Pointless tradition of trying
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out another role on the project, so simplicity was key. Thankfully,
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Haley was itching to build a digital version of a very fun, but
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relatively straightforward, game.
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[Just One](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/254640/just-one) is a
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collaborative word association game that encourages both teamwork and
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creativity. On a given turn, everyone except one player (the Guesser)
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knows a random mystery word and must attempt to get the Guesser to guess
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the mystery word via one-word hints. The catch is that every hint must
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be unique, so duplicate hints are eliminated and not shown to the
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Guesser.
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Haley mentioned that she often hacked the board game to accommodate more
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than 7 players and thought that doing so added a fun element of chaos to
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the rounds. A digital version of the game would facilitate expanding the
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party and it seemed like an easy enough lift for our team.
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It's easier to play than explain, so mosey on over to
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[verbose.club](https://verbose.club) and give it a try. And, if you want
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to know more about how each of us fared going heads down on one project
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for 48 hours (and counting), read on.
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## [**Haley**](https://www.viget.com/about/team/hjohnson/) **\| Pointless Role: Design \| Day Job: PM** {#haley-pointless-role-design-day-job-pm dir="ltr"}
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**My favorite part of building verbose.club** was being granted
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permission to focus on one project with my teammates. We hopped on Meets
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or huddles to discuss requirements. Nicole and I jammed in the same
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Figma file or wireframe. I got to drop everything to QA a 600-word word
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bank. Viget has great ways of collaborating remotely, but it was also
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fun to be part of the in-office crew, having late night snacks between
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cram sessions like we were in college again.
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**Something I learned**: I tried my hand at being a "designer" and
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learned quickly that nothing is too precious. Sometimes the code
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translates things differently. Also, design systems are essential to
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throwing together screens quickly. And Figma has tons of libraries that
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you can use instead of starting from scratch!
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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## [**Haroon**](https://www.viget.com/about/team/hmatties/) **\| Pointless Role: Dev \| Day Job: Product Design** {#haroon-pointless-role-dev-day-job-product-design dir="ltr"}
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**My favorite part of building verbose.club** was stepping into a new
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role, or at least trying to. I got a chance to build out styled
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components and pages for our game with React, Typescript, and Tailwind.
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Though my constant questions for Andrew and David were likely annoying,
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it was an extremely rewarding experience to see a project come to life
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from another perspective.
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**Something I learned** is that it\'s best to keep commits atomic,
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meaning contributions to the codebase are small, isolated, and clear.
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Though a best practice for many, this approach made it easier for me as
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a novice to contribute quickly, and likely made it easier for Andrew to
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fix things later.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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## [**Nicole**](https://www.viget.com/about/team/nrymarz/) **\| Pointless Role: Design \| Day Job: PM** {#nicole-pointless-role-design-day-job-pm dir="ltr"}
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**My favorite part of building verbose.club** was seeing our team
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immediately dive in with a "we're in this together" approach. I am still
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relatively new to Viget and it was my first time working with a handful
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of my teammates, so I really appreciated the collaborative environment
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and how everyone was really open to hearing new ideas, trying something
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new, and working together to make something cool.
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**Something I learned** was how to use [Whimsical](http://whimsical.com)
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and [Figma](http://figma.com) to make wireframes and designs. I had used
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these tools before; but, it was my first time "building" anything at
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Viget --- and it was super fun. I'm glad I got to try something outside
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of my usual PM role.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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## [**Andrew**](https://www.viget.com/about/team/athomas/) **\| Pointless Role: CEO Dev \| Day Job: Dev**
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**My favorite part of building verbose.club** was coordinating work
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among my teammates. With less than 3 days to do everything, we had to
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hit the ground running. To start, our PMs and designer jumped on
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wireframing and design thinking while David brought to life a Rails
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back-end & API. I was in a good spot to act as the messenger between
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these two lines of work: parsing high-level thinking & decisions from
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the designers into information useful to David in crafting the API; then
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shuttling David's feedback back to the broader team.
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Next up, it was time to build out the user-facing Remix app. We were
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able to split this work into two parallel streams. I built out unstyled
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screens, game business logic, and the necessary glue code, resulting in
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a functional app with a barebones UI. In parallel, Haroon built out
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high-fidelity screens, using static placeholders where dynamic content
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would eventually live. From there, collaborating to merge our work and
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upgrade the UI was a simple task.
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I think our team came out of this project inspired by what can be
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accomplished with smart coordination. We managed to efficiently build
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consensus, parallelize work, and learn from one another --- and the
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result speaks for itself.
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**Something I learned** was that parallelizing a project is tricky and
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communication is key. When multiple streams of work are progressing in
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parallel, decisions are constantly being made --- some big, some small
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--- and many having more influence than immediately apparent. Keeping
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all contributors 100% in the loop is likely impossible, and certainly
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unrealistic. Smart coordination and communication is the magic sauce
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that makes it all work.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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## [**David**](https://www.viget.com/about/team/deisinger/) **\| Pointless Role: Dev \| Day Job: Dev** {#david-pointless-role-dev-day-job-dev dir="ltr"}
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**My favorite part of working on verbose.club** was helping from afar. I
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was 1,500 miles and several time zones away from most of the team, so I
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really focused on doing low-level work that would enable the rest of the
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team to be successful: setting up an API, getting the app running on
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Docker for easy local development, and making it straightforward for
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others to deploy code. It was sort of like being the bass player in a
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rad band.
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**Something I learned** is that [Caddy](https://caddyserver.com) is
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super legit. Here's the entire web server config file, which
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automatically sets up HTTPS and proxies traffic to our Remix app:
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verbose.club
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reverse_proxy remix-prod:3001
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Our overall architecture (running with `docker compose`) looks like
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this:
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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In two days' time, we had a beautiful, functioning game that we played
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during our Pointless celebration happy hour. Since then, we've added
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some cool animations and the ability to pull in AI players --- no human
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friends required! So, grab some friends (robot or otherwise) and check
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out [verbose.club](https://verbose.club)!
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