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Name Place Animal Thing

Play Name, Place, Animal, Thing

A word game where everyone finds names, places, animals and things that start with the same letter.

Interactive example · sample data

Name Place
Animal Thing
Solo round
A

Your letter

Think of
something with A.

Four categories0 / 4 filled

Try Alex, Athens, Antelope and Anchor. Or find your own.

Play a round alone or join a real-time multiplayer room. Choose categories, rounds and a timer.

Available on iPhone and Android · iOS / Android

Play alone or with others

Play a solo round with ghost players, or host or join a multiplayer room.

Choose the categories

Use up to six categories, including your own choices.

Vote on answers

Players vote on whether submitted answers count. Correct answers score, and unique answers can score more.

A product Reel

Feature creative, shown separately from the playable example above.

Name Place Animal Thing · 19-second vertical Reel; current custom-category interface, not a native screen recording.

How we built it.

The familiar paper game becomes a timed mobile game with configurable rounds and a shared room for friends. The interesting engineering work is keeping letters, answers, voting and scores in agreement.

Make a round fit the group

Players can change the number of rounds, the timer and the categories. Solo play gives immediate feedback on the starting letter and warns about answers repeated across rounds. Local game history keeps a record of recent sessions, while the daily challenge gives players another way to return to the same basic game.

A server for the shared room

The mobile app uses Expo and React Native. A Node.js and Express backend uses Socket.io to coordinate multiplayer rooms and game events. Answer review belongs to the players through voting. Scoring and duplicate handling need consistent rules across phones, including normalising Unicode text so equivalent spellings are compared fairly.

Gameplay and support in one repository

The app, game server and React/Vite website are maintained together. The mobile game engine handles solo validation and scoring, while the server owns the multiplayer room logic. Keeping these responsibilities explicit makes it possible to review the rules separately from screens and network connections.

Built with

  • JavaScript
  • Expo
  • React Native
  • Node.js
  • Express
  • Socket.io
  • MongoDB
  • React
  • Vite
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