Case

Word games — Spelwijze & Raatsel

Live

Two daily Dutch word games; one with its own puzzle generator.

What & why

Two daily Dutch word games in Spelling-Bee style (hexagon letter board): vanilla JS, PHP and SQLite, as a PWA with offline mode, dark mode, correct IJ digraph and animations/fireworks on success.

A good daily word game in Dutch barely existed. Spelwijze started as a tidy client on an external puzzle source; Raatsel we then built as a standalone app — with a fully self-built puzzle generator, so without any dependence on that external puzzle.

Approach

Spelwijze: a polished, playable PWA on top of an external puzzle source, with an admin panel for users and invite tokens.
Raatsel: its own puzzle generator in Python that draws on OpenTaal, Hunspell and OpenSubtitles and picks the best letter boards with sweet-spot scoring.
Shared base: offline mode, dark mode, IJ as one letter, and celebratory animations.

Technology

Vanilla JS
PHP
SQLite
PWA
Python (generator)

Images & demo

Spelwijze: type a word → approved → the Genie appears → fireworks on a completed round.

Spelwijze in dark mode: the daily hexagonal letter board with Genie and fireworks.

View live →

Spelwijze (live) →Raatsel (live, our own product) →