Kelimoji

Kelimoji came out of a simple observation: at Turkish family and friend gatherings, people who wanted to put the phones down and laugh together had no good word-guessing game that was fully in Turkish and started with zero setup. Fans of the classic Tabu experience either had to carry the box around or make do with apps in a foreign language.

So I built the game I wanted at my own table — a personal project, not a company. The whole thing runs on one phone passed around the room: describe the word on the card to your team, without saying the forbidden words below it, before the timer runs out.

Party games on the web tend to bury a two-minute loop under accounts, tutorials and mid-game ads. And the Turkish ones that exist are mostly translations: the cards feel foreign, the forbidden words miss the obvious Turkish associations, and the difficulty is flat.

The real need was a game that opens in a few seconds, works for everyone from a child to a grandparent, and feels like it was written by someone who actually plays it in Turkish.

Two decisions set the direction. First, the game lives at a URL — no install required, no login, no ad interrupting a round — and installs as a PWA for people who want it on the home screen. Second, the cards are the product. Every card is entered by hand with five forbidden words chosen for Turkish associations, tagged by category, and placed on one of five difficulty levels.

Every rule was tested at real gatherings: how long a round should be, how the difficulty levels should balance, how fast team setup needs to be. If a rule didn't work at the table, the code changed.

The engineering followed the table too. Word transitions used to stall for a moment while the next card loaded; a word buffer that stays ten cards ahead removed the wait entirely, and the countdown now pauses rather than eating into the round if the network ever lags. Each card served is signed so results can't be forged, and the session summary — total words, longest streak, hardest card — is written server-side.

Solo-built, zero-cost infrastructure: a static site on Cloudflare, Supabase for sessions and words, Firebase only for push. The native apps are thin WebView shells around the same codebase, so one fix ships to the web, iOS and Android at once. The marketing site, blog and category pages were added later for discovery — the game itself still carries no ads.

A game that starts in seconds, in Turkish, for everyone at the table — on the web, in the App Store and on Google Play from the same developer account.

Hand-curated cards

5,150

Hand-curated cards

Category tags

122

Category tags

Teams on one phone

2–6

Teams on one phone

Platforms: web, iOS, Android

3

Platforms: web, iOS, Android