January 12, 2026
Almost Ready to Share This With the World
A year of building something for my family. Now I want to share it with yours.
I’ve been building this for about a year.
That’s longer than I expected when I started. I had a vague plan that involved maybe six months: prototype, test, iterate, launch. Clean and simple. The kind of plan that sounds reasonable until you actually start.
The reality, as it usually is, was messier.
There were things that took longer than they should have. The voting system — where players vote on the best word submission and the best drawing each round — went through four or five different designs before I landed on one that felt fair and intuitive. The comic generation required more tuning than I anticipated. The multi-player synchronization, making sure that everyone’s game state stays in sync in real time without anyone having to refresh, is the kind of problem that looks solved right up until it isn’t.
And there were things that took longer than they should have for different reasons — because I was building something personal, and you can’t rush something personal. You have to sit with it. You have to play it with your family on a Tuesday night when nobody was planning to, just to see how it feels. You have to be willing to throw out a month of work because something isn’t right in a way that’s hard to articulate.
I threw out a lot of work. I also kept a lot of work I thought I was going to throw out.
The thing that surprised me most was how much the game changed what I thought it was.
I started building a digital version of the kitchen-table three-word game. That’s all. A way to play the game we loved with people who aren’t in the same room.
Somewhere along the way it became something else: a way to make comic strips together, with drawings and AI-generated story cards and permanent shareable links. A way to play in a classroom. A way for a grandparent in a different city to build a story with grandchildren they don’t see often enough. A way for a kid to photograph their crayon drawing and have it live forever inside something they made with their family.
I didn’t plan any of that. It grew out of the thing the game was actually good for.
I’m still learning what it is.
Here’s what I know as I’m getting ready to share this with people I don’t know:
It’s not perfect. There are features I wanted to build that aren’t there yet. There are rough edges. There are things that work fine 98% of the time and mysteriously misbehave the other 2%.
But it’s real. People can play it. Families can make things together in it and keep those things. And when I watch that happen — even now, just with our family, just informally — it feels like exactly what I was trying to build.
I’m scared to share it. That’s the honest version. Something you built for people you love, shown to strangers, is a different thing entirely. You can’t know in advance whether it translates.
But I think it does. I think the game works the same way around any kitchen table, real or virtual. The constraint of three words, the handoff, the trust in the next person — those things don’t require knowing each other to function. They just require showing up and playing.
So: if you’ve read this far, here’s my invitation.
Show up. Play.
Make a story with someone. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be yours.