Aldrig spillet is the Danish name for the drinking game the rest of the world calls never have I ever: a statement is read out, and everyone it is true for drinks. The whole game is the statements, which is why it lives or dies on who wrote them. There are more than 1,500 of them, in forty categories.
Two days, because the plan had already been made
The evening was arranged around a site that already existed on this domain. It turned out to have been shut down, which is the sort of thing nobody checks until the week of the party.
So it was built again from nothing in two days. This was before there was an AI to hand any of it to, so two days means two days of typing — and the software was not the long part.
The category picker
On the face of it the picker is the ordinary feature, and with forty categories it earns its place honestly: nobody wants all of them at once, and which ones suit a particular room is not something the software can work out.
That is not why it is there. It is there so that a few categories could be kept out of the list until the right moment — written for this party, aimed squarely at the bride and groom, and switched on once everyone was sitting down. The general feature exists to carry the specific joke. It is the only part of the software anybody remembers.
Technical notes
Laravel on the back, Vue through Inertia on the front, Tailwind for the interface. A game that reads a statement, waits, and moves on is a single screen that never reloads, which is the shape Inertia is for.
Two days is not long enough to be clever, and it did not need to be. It needed to work on a dozen phones in a living room on a Saturday night, once. It has been up ever since.
