Kukurigo
Daily mini-game competition: one game a day, one shot, ranked against friends, provinces and countries. Launching on iOS and Android.
Kukurigo is a daily mini-game competition app I founded and am building on my own. Every morning at 10:00 a wheel picks one of 36 mini-games and everyone plays the same one, with one scored shot and one practice run. Scores feed friend lobbies, a weekly league and province and country leaderboards. It is a pnpm/Turborepo monorepo: an Expo/React Native app for iOS and Android, a Fastify API with Drizzle ORM on PostgreSQL, and 36 game engines shared by the phone and the server, with RevenueCat subscriptions, AdMob, Sentry, Resend email, and Turkish and English throughout.
Context
Daily puzzles like Wordle turned one shared game a day into a ritual people talk about with their friends. Most mobile games compete for unlimited play time instead, and a score means little when everyone is playing a different board.
Problem
A shared daily game only works if the score can be trusted. When everyone plays the same puzzle against the same clock, the phone cannot be the one reporting the result: a modified app could simply send a perfect run. The game also has to bring people back the next day without becoming the endless play it set out to avoid.
Approach
The server is the authority. The phone sends only moves; puzzle seeds come from an HMAC, reported timings are clamped, and physics games are replayed on the server in fixed 60 Hz steps from the touch log. All 36 game engines live in one shared package, so the phone and the server run the same code. Version 2.0.0 adds Macera, an adventure mode played level by level: 144 levels across four worlds at launch, unlocked by the day's real attempt, with lives, continues and a weekly star race in the lobby that never touches the daily rankings. Levels are written as data, built into the app by a script and published through a locked catalog in which a level can be revised or retired but never deleted. Star thresholds are measured with bots across 20,000 boards, and new features ship behind flags the server checks at startup, refusing to boot on an unsafe configuration.
Outcome
About 690 commits in four weeks since the first one on 28 September 2026, with around 2,100 automated tests and 46 database migrations. The site is live at kukurigo.app, and the app is about to launch on the App Store and Google Play as version 2.0.0, with Macera included.
