Project notes
A closer look at the design decisions, technical choices, and problems this project was built to solve.
Turning the miles into a game
RoadScore is a road-trip card game designed for one shared phone. A passenger runs the game, the driver stays focused on the road, and everyone in the car gets something to notice, discuss, or compete for.
I built the mobile game, its deck-catalog service, and a bilingual marketing site as one pnpm monorepo. The browser version is playable now; the native iOS and Android releases remain clearly marked as coming soon until their public store listings exist.
Goals
- Make road time social without requiring every passenger to install an app or create an account.
- Work offline by default so a lost signal never ends the trip.
- Protect the driver’s attention by assigning control to a co-pilot or another fixed passenger.
- Support different groups with bilingual content, custom decks, flexible session recipes, and consent-gated adult content.
What I built
- A complete free Road Trip Mix with 350 English and Spanish cards spanning trivia, spotting, conversations, challenges, and activities.
- Flexible trip sessions with balanced, quick, scenic, conversation, and chaos recipes; competitive or cooperative play; and optional card, point, or time finish lines.
- Fast shared-phone scoring with a rotating Card Reader, saved challenges, score correction, live standings, and accessible alternatives to gestures.
- Private personalization for favorites, hidden cards, custom deck import and export, and a 20-trip on-device journal with rematches.
- Optional premium decks with platform purchase restoration and a separate consent boundary for Adults Only content.
- A versioned catalog pipeline that publishes validated immutable deck snapshots while devices keep their last known-good catalog offline.
Technical highlights
- Mobile:
Expo,React Native,Expo Router,TypeScript,Zustand, and Lumen’s React Native components. - Web:
Astro, bilingual static content, an install-free browser build, and Lumen’s web components. - Services:
Hono,Cloudflare Workers,D1, signed owner access, and shared Zod contracts. - Delivery:
Turborepo,pnpm, EAS, GitHub Actions, deterministic catalog generation, and a broad release preflight.
Privacy and safety boundaries
RoadScore does not need an account or analytics service. Passengers, scores, trip history, custom decks, and purchase state stay on the device. The catalog service receives no game data or device identifier; it only returns the same published card catalog to every player.
The game also states its most important rule plainly: RoadScore is for a passenger to operate. The driver should never handle the phone while the vehicle is moving.
Current launch state
The production website, catalog service, and web game are deployed. iPhone and Android builds follow separate testing, store-processing, and public-release steps, so the site does not show store buttons until stable public listing URLs are available.
