Unkoad

unkoad.com ↗

When I was about ten, my cousin and I played this on paper in the back of the car. One of us thought of a code and the other had to break it.

The game was very simple. You pick a secret code, I guess, you tell me how close I got, and we keep going until I get it. Then we swap and I hide one. It needed no board and no batteries, and it kept us busy for whole drives.

Years later some friends and I built it as an Android game called Dekode. It was mostly an excuse to stay current, because we used whatever library or architecture had just come out.

Dekode changed one rule, and that change made the game much better. Instead of taking turns hiding codes from each other, both players go after the same code at the same time. You can see every guess your opponent makes and how close it was, so you are racing them and using their guesses at once. Dekode found players, but never many. It only ran on Android, so I could not play against a lot of people.

What it is now

Unkoad is the same game on the web. There is nothing to install and no account to make, so anyone you send the link to can play. You can play alone against a code the app picks, or race someone else at the same code. Whoever cracks it on their turn wins.

The new part is the daily challenge. Everyone gets the same code on the same day, so there is a reason to come back and something to compare.

Still playing

My cousin is still the person I play it with most. He played Dekode when it was running and he plays Unkoad now. A lot of how the game works came out of those games, and he finds most of the bugs before anyone else does.

Status

Live at unkoad.com

Built with

Go, Firestore, Cloud Run, Vite, Tailwind — installable as a PWA