The Bouncer Is Finally Here!🕴️🚪

Remember This Little Idea?

A while ago, I wrote about how I was addicted to daily games and decided to finally make one of my own. Check it out 👉here👈

That idea was The Bouncer.

The concept was simple:

There is a hidden rule. Six words show up. Your job is to figure out who gets in and who gets kicked out.

At the time, it was just an idea sitting inside a planning.md file.

And.. its alive now!!!

What Exactly Is The Bouncer?

The Bouncer is a daily deduction game where you play the role of, well... the bouncer.

Six words are waiting outside the club.

Your job is to decide whether each word should go:

IN ✅

OUT ❌

The catch?

You don't know the rule.

You have to figure it out.

Maybe there's something about the spelling.

Maybe the meaning.

Maybe the sound.

Maybe something you would never have thought of.

You get six words and have to make your best guesses, slowly forming theories and testing them as you go.

And unlike my original idea, I decided not to force it to be exactly 3 IN and 3 OUT.

The ratio can be anything.

5:1. 4:2. 3:3. 2:4. 1:5.

This was actually quite important.

If you figured out the three "IN" words and then just swiped everything else OUT, you could basically cheese the game.

I wanted the player to actually think about every word.

The Goal Wasn't To Make Another Wordle

I love Wordle.

I love Connections.

I love Poople.

I love all these little daily games that somehow manage to steal a few minutes of my life every single day.

But I didn't want to make another game that was just a variation of something that already existed.

I wanted The Bouncer to feel a little different.

The goal is to make you go through something like:

"What the fuck is the rule?"

↓

"Could it be this?"

↓

"Let me test that."

↓

"Ohhh...THAT'S THE RULE!" (this part rarely happens for me💔)

That final "ohhh" is what I'm chasing.

Building The Actual Game 🛠️

The original post ended with:

The idea was ready.
The design was ready.
The plan was ready.

Now came the actual making.

And yea...the making part was a lot more complicated than I expected. 😭

The biggest challenge wasn't actually getting the game to work.

It was getting the puzzles to work.

I needed the rules to be:

Interesting
Solvable
Not immediately obvious
Not ridiculously difficult
And, most importantly, not boring

This turned out to be much harder than I expected.

I experimented with different types of rules, including lexical, semantic and phonetic patterns, and even used tools like DataMuse and ConceptNet to explore relationships between words.

And then I discovered something very important:

AI is really good at making puzzles.

It is also really good at making some absolutely terrible puzzles. 🙏

A lot of the generated puzzles had interesting ideas but were repetitive or just... meh.

So I ended up building something that I'm probably a little too proud of:

My beautiful admin section. 😌

It lets me review, edit, refine, approve and schedule puzzles before they actually make it into the game.

This meant I didn't have to blindly trust the puzzle generator.

I could actually curate the puzzles myself.

And honestly, this became one of my favourite parts of the whole project.

The Game Is Still Evolving 🧠

The Bouncer isn't something I consider completely "finished."

I'm still playtesting it.

I've had around 4–5 friends play it, including one friend who is basically the exact target audience for this kind of game.

And his feedback was genuinely useful.

One of the biggest things he pointed out was that if I relied too heavily on semantic rules, The Bouncer could start feeling too similar to games like Connections.

But the lexical rules — things involving the actual structure and properties of words — felt much more interesting.

That pushed me to improve the puzzle generator and experiment with combinations of:

🔤 Lexical rules
🧠 Semantic rules
🔊 Phonetic rules
🔀 Hybrid rules

I am still refining this.

And that's probably going to be an ongoing part of The Bouncer.

From An Idea To Something Actually Online 🌐

The tech stack itself was pretty familiar territory for me:

React + Vite
Tailwind CSS
MongoDB
Netlify
Claude

I had already worked with most of these technologies before.

So this project was really my chance to apply what I'd learned and see if I could take an idea all the way from brainstorming to something people could actually use.

And that was probably the most satisfying part.

Not just finishing the code.

Not even seeing the final UI.

It was when I set up the SEO, generated the sitemap, got the site indexed and then searched:

"the bouncer word game"

And there it was.

My game. On Google.

It gave me this weird feeling that's difficult to explain.

It's almost like when you search your own name on Google and suddenly you're actually there — with photos, information, everything.

For a moment, it felt like:

"Holy shit. I actually exist on the internet." 😭

And that was probably my favourite moment of the entire project - other than , of course, the beautiful admin section.👀

Go Be The Bouncer 🕴️

Enough of me talking about it.

The Bouncer is live.

🚪 Play The Bouncer

You get a new puzzle every day.

Six words.

IN or OUT.

Figure out the rule.

And then, obviously, flex on your friends. 💪

Make it a daily competition.

See who can figure out the rule first.

See who gets the highest score.

And please...

send me feedback.

There's a little feedback button sitting inside the settings menu that sends straight to me. Tell me which puzzles you loved, which ones were absolute garbage, what felt confusing, or what you'd change.

I genuinely want to improve this thing.