On October 10th, 2025, we had our first Gametje night at Het Rotterdam Collectief. Our first event had 8 people (and my 2 kids) present for the fun. Most joiners had not played any of my the games before.

We had a mixture of nationalities present including Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, American, and Polish. Quite the diverse crowd! We had some delicious snacks and some drinks and played ~7 games over 2.5 hours. Canvas Clash was the favorite, but we also played Snaption, Sync Think, and Requip.

In the last 30 days, Gametje has been played in over 40 countries and over 60 countries in the last 6 months! I’m really blown away by how far it has reached with basically no advertising. It is always interesting to get a new country trying it out and makes me wonder “How did you find it?”. I wish I had a way to reach out to them.

Full time?

Gametje has been a side project of mine since January 2023. For the first 2 years or so, I had 12-15 hours a week to work on it (+ evenings). In January 2025, I took on another freelance job alongside my regular part-time job so I have only been able to work during my evenings and weekends. Progress was slow and I haven’t been able to execute on all the ideas I have had for new games and improvements to the website. I mainly took the freelance job to earn enough money to bootstrap working on Gametje full-time. I’ve been wanting to try it for quite a while and now it seems like I will be able to do that. Starting from August, I will be able to put my full focus into Gametje.

Gametje V1

If you have read my about page, you may remember that I did an initial implementation of a couple games back in the Fall of 2017. I mainly did it at the time to learn NodeJS which was all the rage back then. I was able to build the frontend and backend in the same code base and it mostly worked. I also deployed it using the Heroku free tier which was pretty neat. At the time, I didn’t know much about containerization/Docker or running my own VPS, so it was the simplest way to share it with friends. You also can’t argue with free (the database too!). I was able to develop a prototype pretty quickly, but I never felt that comfortable with NodeJS. Typescript wasn’t really around yet and I missed the strongly typed help from Java. My job at that time was primarily backend oriented with some frontend built using jsps which were dated even at that time…

Getting Ideas

My kids have been bugging me about creating another game that they can play. I already have RPS SHOOT which is a twist on the classic Rock, Paper, Scissors game that they enjoy, but that game is nearly a year old now. Kids get bored easily and always want a shiny new thing to play with after all. My daughter is not able to read that well yet so I knew I needed to do something without many words. I thought about the games my kids like to play. Some of their current favorites are UNO, Go Fish, Memory and Yahtzee. They also love to play hide and seek (especially when I pretend to be bad at looking). Last year, I had been playing around with some protoypes using HTML Canvas to try to make a more traditional game on the platform. I looked at PixiJS which seemed promising but was a bit overkill for what I wanted to do. Perhaps I’ll revisit that in the future for other games.

New Game - Sync Think

I have been working on a new game that is currently available for Alpha testers. The working title is ‘Sync Think’. The general idea is for players to submit a random word or phrase and then work together to converge on a single word. The faster you match with another player, the more points you’ll score. It is inspired by this improv game called Mind Meld. It is typically only played with two players, but my version supports 2-16 players. When more then 2 people are playing, two words from the myriad of guesses are chosen randomly to be the words for the next “level”. With many people playing, it is possible for some players to match and others not. Once you match, you’ll score points. It continues until everyone has matched or one player is left out. It will also stop after the maximum level has been reached (currently set at 7).

Welcome to the first Gametje blog. I plan on documenting development progress and other technical decisions/research that goes into making the games on gametje.com