Scattergories

A browser-based companion for playing Scattergories at the table: no physical timer, die, or category cards needed. Single-page React app, no backend.

Live demo: scattergories.duinlab.nl

Features

• Rolls a letter with locale-aware weighting, so common, playable letters come up more often
• Draws a round of categories, with a built-in timer, pause, and end-of-round screen
• Redraw categories on each new letter, or pin a fixed board
• Built-in and custom category packs, persisted locally in the browser
• 9 fully-translated languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Greek
• Installable as a PWA, with no account or server required

Status

Feature-complete as a play aid. It runs fully client-side and stores everything in the browser; local-first by design, so there's no backend to host and your settings and custom categories never leave your device. It's a companion for in-person play, so it deliberately doesn't track scores or validate answers.

Stack

React 19 · TypeScript · Vite · i18next · Vitest · Playwright · Biome

A separate Python (uv + Typer) tooling package in tools/ regenerates the locale assets (letter-frequency weights and translations) that the app ships.

Getting started

Tool versions are pinned in mise.toml (Node 24.13.0, pnpm 10.33.2, Python 3.14). With mise installed:

mise install     # provisions the pinned Node, pnpm, and Python
pnpm install
pnpm dev          # http://localhost:5173
pnpm build        # static build to dist/

Without mise, install Node 24+ and pnpm 10+ yourself, then run the same pnpm commands.

Deploy dist/ to any static host with an SPA fallback to index.html.

Reproducibility & quality

Every dependency is locked (pnpm-lock.yaml, tools/uv.lock) and every tool version is pinned via mise.toml, so a clean checkout builds identically. The same gates run locally, in pre-push hooks (lefthook.yml), and in CI:

pnpm check        # typecheck (tsc) + spellcheck (cspell) + lint (biome)
pnpm test         # unit / component tests (vitest)
pnpm test:e2e     # end-to-end tests (playwright)
pnpm verify       # check + test + build + bundle-size budget
pnpm ci           # verify, then the Python tools' ruff + ty + pytest

Quality is enforced, not just encouraged: the core game logic in src/domain/game/ is held to 95%+ line and 100% function coverage (see vite.config.ts), and the production bundle is capped at an 80 KiB gzip budget (scripts/check-bundle-budgets.mjs).

Project layout

• src/: the React app, containing domain/game/ (pure game logic), features/ (round, categories, settings), app/ (shell and controller hooks), and i18n/ (locales and registry)
• tools/: Python CLI (sg-tools) for inspecting and regenerating locale assets
• tests/: Playwright end-to-end specs

License

MIT © Simon van Lierde