Meeting Bingo

It started exactly where the name says. Some meetings are a genuine use of everyone’s morning. The others are “circling back” to “align on synergies” and “socialise the roadmap”. You can’t leave, so you may as well score points.

Then it got taken to a film night, and quietly changed jobs. A card of “Clever girl”, “Hold onto your butts” and “Spared no expense” beats any meeting card ever dealt: everyone is watching the same thing, everyone knows the line is coming, and the room goes up half a second before it lands.

So the word lists grew. There are 41 packs now — every Star Wars film, six Jurassic Park entries, Men in Black, the Godfather trilogy, Game of Thrones, The Office, eight music packs, football and basketball. You can also just type your own, one line per tile, which is what most film nights end up doing anyway. The meeting packs are still in there; they are simply no longer the point.

Every player gets their own shuffled card, marks tiles as the words land, and the first to a line wins. There’s a chat, there are emoji reactions that float across everyone’s screen at once, and there are unlockable card themes, because if you’re going to build something silly you should commit to it. It’s here on the site for the same reason it exists: not everything I build needs to justify itself.

It’s a real-time multiplayer game with no backend of my own. Firestore’s live listeners do the synchronisation: every client subscribes to the room document, and marking a tile is a write everyone else sees land. There is no socket server to keep alive, nothing to scale, and nothing to wake up for at 3am.

The second half is distribution. It’s an installable PWA, and the Android build is a Trusted Web Activity wrapping that same PWA, verified by digital asset links — so the app and the website are one codebase, deployed once, with no separate mobile project to keep in step. A silly game is exactly the right place to find out whether that arrangement actually holds up.

The game is free and always will be. Everything that is actually a feature — the rooms, the multiplayer, the win conditions, all 41 word packs, the chat, the reactions, the editor for your own lists — costs nothing and is not going anywhere behind anything.

There is a shop, and it sells things that do not matter. Today that is card themes, which are decoration, and which you can also just win by playing rather than buying. Word packs will join them at around fifty cents — and a word pack is precisely the thing you could sit down and type yourself in ten minutes, for free, in the editor that ships with the game.

Nothing in there is pay-to-win and nothing in there unlocks a feature. It exists because the packs cost me time and a bit of imagination. If someone reckons that is worth fifty cents, lovely. If not, also lovely — go and play. The game cannot tell the difference, and it is not supposed to.