We made a game! GhostV.net — A fun social word game for friends and colleagues online & offline
My favorite party game played for more than 12 years with hundreds of friends now has a digital version! Thanks to Savanna Endicott, together, we made it possible.
The game is similar to another word game called UNDERCOVER, but better. If you are with 4–12 friends ready to have fun, whether in person or through an online meeting (Zoom, Google Hangout, Facetime, Discord, Clubhouse), play it together anytime using ghostv.net (or bookmark it for the future)!
Here is a demo I made to show how to play:
The game is much easier to get started with than Werewolf but much more challenging and fun than codewords. It only takes 3–15 minutes per round, depending on how many players. Most of the time, it ends with waves of laughter and new understandings of the players. It’s perfect as an ice-breaking starter or team bonding activity.
- it’s easy to learn, and everyone has the same opportunity to talk;
- people get different roles and words randomly, so every round is a fresh start.
Why do I want to make it?
When I first play the game with schoolmates in person, we need a host to generate the word sets and write them down on a small piece of paper. Then everyone picks a piece with a word and starts playing. But now, we have the online system as the host and all players can enjoy the game together.
As a non-native speaker and foreigner, I found most of the popular games we played at the workplace, like trivia or fibbage are too culture or vocabulary-based, and it’s always has a ranking system that I sadly often got the last place. I feel too nervous or disappointing playing those games. While games like Among us or Werewolf require telling lies too much to win. Work is already tiring; why add more tension when you have fun?
I was a board game fan and party animal 🤫 who knows a lot of games. It’s hard to believe that after playing so many rounds of this GhostV game, I’m still obsessed with it. Even just watching others play can be fun! No wonder the similar game UNDERCOVRE(谁是卧底 in Chinese) has been played on one of the most popular Chinese TV show Happy Camp.
One real impressive example I remember playing with our design team was, a player got the word Blow, and he speak the first with the description “this is what you need to make a balloon.” And suddenly everybody else starts to hold their laugh, successfully or not — because the word they all got is Fart. 🌬
Thanks to the game and players, I also learned a lot of things I didn’t know before. When people describe the word, they are also sharing their perspective and knowledge of how the world is. For example, I learned there are more than two superheroes' costumes are colored red and blue; California has a wildflower called seaside daisy or seaside fleabane; there are male and female vampires; Whisky has multiple colors…
Indeed, the quality of the game highly depends on who you are playing with. Hope you will enjoy the time as much as I did 🙌
The story behind the website
I had the idea to build this game in early 2019. As a designer, I don’t know how to build it, more specifically, code the backend. I’ve asked around with my developer friends to sell this project, but no positive response. I understand how much time and effort an engineer have to invest in a project like this. Game, this category is, in general, a no-no, don’t mention an online multi-player game.
So I put this idea aside and waited. In 2019, when I chose job offers, can make amazing engineer friends is on my consideration list. And I believe MongoDB is a “paradise for engineers”. So I joined. Sadly, in my first week during onboarding, there was an internal game hackathon I just missed😭.
Not too long later, I made several good friends work close with me that I can share my side project ideas. Before inviting them, I spared some weekends drafting a one-page product description doc and the UI design for the game.
With the idea, doc and UI design, and network of great engineers, I believe that the chance become much better this time. When I noticed Savanna(we are in the same team at MongoDB) is hosting games for us during the social time and she loves coding, I have the feeling that she might be the one.
And I finally got a YES! Everything else left is comparable easy on my side. Design, code, content, test, step by step. After almost a year of ongoing effort, I’m thrilled and proud to share with you the V1 of the game today!
From idea to production, we only use these tools:
📃 Google doc — collaborate on the product requirement
🖼 Figma — UI Design and prototyping
👩💻 GitHub — development, content management, and version control
📌 Trello — task tracking for bugs and new ideas
🚀 Heroku — host and deployment
🌐 Google Domain — to get ghostv.net
No Zoom, no Slack, no bullshit. This project might be the most efficient one ever. Savannah and I only had a kick-off 20 min chat before she took on this project, and everything after that call happened asynchronously during our spare time. She was coding after Christmas and I was beta testing in the Spring festival. She was highly involved in the feature definition and prioritization, as well as improved the game flows and experiences. It was such a pleasure working with her.
There is no profit or business involved in the project.
It’s purely something we want to build that could bring happiness, joy, and connection to more people. This is our way, as makers of digital products, to fight back against the pandemic.
How to play it without the app
Once you got to know the game well and want to add some creativity, you can play it without our website. When you are with your friends together, you need one person to be the host and generate a pair of words to give to other players (secretly). Then, you are not playing as a player but act as the host to run the voting and announce the game results. I did that a lot previously, as I said, if the words are interesting, watching others play can be fun, too!
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any suggestions or questions about the game through Medium or email: vvuxdesign at gmail dot com
I also created a Discord server for everyone to easier host games!
Special thanks to Max Xu help us fix some tech difficulties, and MongoDB design team’s feedback and suggestion, and Wei, Cecilia, Connie, Joyce, Yiyan for multiple rounds of beta testings. Lastly, the Plotguru team — my first startup experience in the US (2014–2016), inspired me for a lifetime to keep building fun things ❤️
