Unrepeatable parlor games that generate post-game artifacts no one else will ever hold.
Every game night vanishes. The jokes, the accusations, the confessions — gone by morning. Ephemera Engine turns structured social games into evenings that produce things: handbound confession albums, noir case files, sealed letters that arrive a week later. The phone is a candle on the table, not a flashlight in the face.
Four games. Three phases each (preparation, game night, post-game). Procedural generation, curated content libraries, and player-supplied material ensure no two evenings are alike.
| Game | Mechanic | One-liner |
|---|---|---|
| The Confession Album | Chain Q&A with a shrinking board | Victorian parlor tradition meets Proust's questionnaire |
| Murder Mystery | AI-generated settings, 3-act dinner party | A speakeasy, a poisoning, six suspects, one evening |
| Whose Memory? | Anonymous storytelling + group attribution | Guess who lived it |
| The Exquisite Corpse | Collaborative cut-up fiction | Surrealist party game, digitally scaffolded |
The only runnable code is the artifact rendering pipeline — Nunjucks templates compiled to print-quality PDFs via Puppeteer.
cd artifacts && npm install
# Render a Confession Album booklet
npm run render:album
# Render a Murder Mystery case file
npm run render:dossier
# Render all 6 templates
npm run render:all
# Type checking
npm run typecheckPDFs output to artifacts/output/.
flowchart TD
subgraph docs[Design Corpus]
D[DESIGN.md] --> PRD[PRD.md]
S[STRATEGY.md] --> PRD
R[RESEARCH.md] --> PRD
end
PRD --> CONST[Constitution]
PRD --> SPECS[6 SpecKit Specs]
subgraph artifacts[Artifact Pipeline]
NJK[Nunjucks Templates] --> RENDER[render.ts]
CSS[Design System CSS] --> RENDER
FIX[Fixture Data] --> RENDER
RENDER --> PDF[PDF Output]
end
SPECS -.->|spec 006 wraps| RENDER
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| Pitch Deck | Interactive pitch deck (GitHub Pages) |
| DESIGN.md | Series framework, four game designs, template system |
| STRATEGY.md | Market analysis, architecture, monetization, ritual design theory |
| RESEARCH.md | Academic synthesis (~270 citations across 7 domains) |
| PRD.md | Full product requirements (~2,700 lines, ~45 screens) |
| EVALUATION.md | Full project review, contradiction resolution, scorecard |
| MANIFEST.md | Annotated bibliography of all 75 project files |
| specs/ | 7 SpecKit specifications decomposing the PRD (incl. 002b-monetization) |
| memory/constitution.md | 4 architectural gates every change must pass |
Phase: Design Complete, Evaluated. All design documents, the artifact rendering pipeline, 7 implementation specifications, and a full project evaluation are finished. V1 scope: 2 games (Confession Album + Murder Mystery), curated content, no LLM, no IAP.
| Milestone | Status |
|---|---|
| Design corpus (DESIGN, STRATEGY, RESEARCH, PRD) | Done |
| Artifact rendering pipeline (6 templates, CSS design system) | Done |
| SpecKit specifications (7 feature areas, incl. 002b-monetization) | Done |
| Project evaluation & contradiction resolution (8 fixes, 6 gaps filled) | Done |
| Curated murder mystery seeds (5 hand-authored scenarios) | Done |
| GitHub Actions CI (typecheck) | Done |
| Content library authoring (question lineages) | Next |
| Implementation (specs 001→002→005→006→003→004) | Planned |
Build order: Auth (001) -> Pre-Game (002) -> Dashboard (005) -> Artifacts (006) -> Confession Album (003) -> Murder Mystery (004)
Planned stack: TypeScript 5.x, React Native + Expo, Supabase, Expo SQLite, Claude API, Puppeteer + Nunjucks.