I made a game site because I didn’t like the existing ones (and learned to stop overengineering)

Rupert — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:11:52 +0000

So this started because I just wanted to play a simple board game online without ads, accounts, or 20 popups asking for my email.

Turns out that’s weirdly hard to find.

So naturally I thought:
“Okay, I’ll just build one.”

For context: I’ve been coding for over a decade and work as a senior engineer at a fintech company. I spend my days building serious systems for real users and real money.

Which made me extremely confident about building a tiny game site.
(That confidence lasted about 3 days.)

At first, I did what enterprise brain told me to do:

set up infrastructure
configure logging
think about scalability
add monitoring
look into Grafana dashboards
consider Prometheus metrics
worry about deployment pipelines

For an app with 0 users and 1 game

I had beautiful metrics though.
No one was playing, but the graphs were immaculate.

Eventually I deleted half of it and just focused on making the game feel good.

I also tried using AI tools seriously for the first time on a full project, and honestly it changed how fast I could move.

Not in a “AI built everything for me” way, but more like:

generate boilerplate
help debug weird logic
refactor ugly code
explain why something breaks

It felt like pair programming with someone who never gets tired and doesn’t judge my 2am code.

Still had to decide what the product should be though.
AI can write code, but it can’t tell you what’s worth building.

The hardest part wasn’t coding.
It was deciding what NOT to build.

My instinct was to add accounts, profiles, settings, leaderboards, achievements, analytics, notifications

Then I kept asking:

Would this make the game more fun?

90% of the time the answer was no.

So I cut aggressively and tried to make it as click and play as possible.

Which is weirdly harder than building features.

It’s intentionally boring in the best way possible.

One thing this project taught me:
simple is not the same as easy.

When there’s nothing hiding the game, every bug is obvious.
Every UI choice matters.
There’s nowhere to hide behind complexity.

Games are brutal like that.

I didn’t build this because I wanted a startup.
I built it because I didn’t like what already existed.

And because it was fun to make something small, opinionated, and finished instead of another half-built “platform”.

Main lessons learned:

stop building infrastructure for imaginary users

don’t set up Grafana for your own side project

build the thing first

only add complexity when reality demands it

Anyway, just wanted to share.
If anyone wants to poke at it or give feedback, here’s the site 👉

Curious if anyone else here has built something out of pure annoyance and then had to unlearn their enterprise habits.

Forem: Rupert

I made a game site because I didn’t like the existing ones (and learned to stop overengineering)