An Information Bottleneck at Game Night
Game night shouldn’t come with an administrative burden. So I built a scorekeeping app that gets the scorekeeper back in the game.
Duration
February 2025
Client
Personal Project
Services
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Web development
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UI/UX
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Business analysis
Challenge
Eliminate the bookkeeping that was getting in the way of game night.
Keeping score for Up and Down the River meant constantly writing down bids, calculating scores, checking the math, and answering “Wait, what’s my score?” Instead of playing the game, the scorekeeper was managing it.
Solution
Design, build, and launch a solution in under 24 hours, just in time for the next game night.
With a self-imposed deadline and limited coding experience, I focused on building the simplest version that could solve the problem. That meant making quick decisions about what mattered, learning what I needed along the way, and getting a working product into players’ hands:
Scope the MVP: Prioritized the core features needed to replace our paper score sheet and saved everything else for later.
Design + build in tandem: Made UX, UI, and technical decisions simultaneously, using AI coding tools to turn the concept into a functioning web app.
Test at the table: Put the app to use at the very next game night, using real gameplay to uncover friction and guide improvements.
Impact
The game stayed the same. The experience got better.
Gameplay became smoother, scoring disputes disappeared, and finally, the scorekeeper could participate fully. This experience reinforced a lesson I have seen repeatedly in larger systems: information problems are rarely about scale or sophistication alone, but about how well information intake, processing, and visibility align with human behavior.