A 9-year-old's paper word game, playable in an hour with Claude
She invented the rules, the name and the board: words climbing from 3 to 7 letters in a pizza-slice shape. Claude turned her design into code, and it became a real daily puzzle over a weekend.
Done withClaudeSpotted· by HN user tryanythingonce· Oct 15, 2026
Result Now a daily puzzle with a leaderboard
“We used AI heavily in the build process — she had the idea and the rules, I used Claude to translate her design into working code fast.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Their daughter designed a word chain game on paper: each word starts with the last letter of the previous one, climbing from 3 to 7 letters in a pizza-slice shape, with some letters locked in each day and Scrabble-style scoring. She had the idea and the rules; the parent used Claude to turn her design into working code, a single HTML file of about 90KB hosted on Cloudflare Pages with a leaderboard.
How it went
It went from paper sketch to playable in about an hour, became a real daily puzzle over a weekend, and they’ve kept improving it since.
Try it yourself with Claude
My child designed this game on paper: [describe the rules, board and scoring, or attach a photo]. Turn it into a single-page web game that works on phones, keeping their rules exactly. Ask me about anything ambiguous instead of guessing. Make a new puzzle each day that's the same for everyone, and keep the code simple enough for us to change together.
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