[cromulent2]

A daily, async version of the dictionary game.

Each day, players try to spot the real definition of an obscure word among the fakes submitted by other players the day before. Fake definitions rank on a daily leaderboard.

I love the traditional version of the game, but it's not so easy to get a session going. An asynchronous, global format is my attempt to make it more casual and accessible.

It's live for about a month now: ~100 daily players, 5000 total, some 20 people on 10-day streaks.

https://plausiblegame.com/en

[iryndin]

Pretty! What tech is behind it ?

[cromulent2]

Thanks! Frontend is Nextjs. Flask, Postgres and Redis in the backend. Hosted on a cheap VPS.

I spent way too much time trying to automate moderation (grouping related submissions, judging similarity, removing offensive submissions) using sentence-transformers and w2v. Finally gave up and settled on using deepseek to moderate for 0.002€ a day.

One thing I'm currently working on is improving the exploration vs exploitation balance in matchmaking (selecting the fakes to present to a player). I want sessions to contain good fakes, but every fake must be played a few times to judge its quality. As a first step, I'm replacing the ELO system for definitions with one that accounts for uncertainty (like Trueskill)