The Marriage Game
A personal project — digitizing a favorite couples' board game for my wife and me.
The Context
My wife and I love board games, and we had a favorite couples' game that we kept coming back to. But the physical version was a hassle — tiny cards, fiddly pieces, and setup that ate into the actual playing time. I figured if I could put a blackjack game on a TV and phones, I could do the same thing here. This was a personal project, built for our own use.
What I Built
A digital board game with the main game board displayed on a screen (TV or laptop) and each player using their phone as a private controller. The board has 28 spaces with different activity types, a ring progression system that changes the experience as you advance, and category-based prompts drawn from over 400 entries. The real-time sync between the central display and both phone clients uses Socket.IO, so everything updates instantly. I also built a full transaction log that records every game event — originally for debugging, but it turned out to be fun to look back on.
The Technical Challenge
The interesting part was the phone-as-controller pattern. Some information is public (the board, whose turn it is, dice rolls) and some is private (the card you just drew). The architecture had to handle both simultaneously — broadcasting public state to all connected clients while sending private data only to the right player's phone. Docker containerization made it easy to spin up anywhere.
More Projects
← Back to PortfolioGot Something That Needs Building?
Whether it's a website, a system that won't sync, or an idea that sounds a little too wild — that's my sweet spot.
Let's Build Something Amazing →