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Boardify - Hackathon Submission

Inspiration

We are international students who bonded over board games on the first day of the hackathon. It was a great way to break the ice, but we quickly realized a problem: once we leave, we can’t keep playing together because most quality online board game platforms are behind paywalls or require complex setups. We wanted to democratize this experience. We built Boardify to let friends anywhere play any board game—whether it’s a classic they miss from home or a brand-new game they just invented—instantly and for free.

What it does

Boardify is an AI-powered game engine that turns text descriptions into fully playable, multiplayer online card games in seconds.

Input: You type a game name (e.g., "Uno", "Exploding Kittens") or a completely new idea (e.g., "A card game about hacking where you steal GPUs").
Generation: Our AI agent researches the official rules (or improvises new ones), designs the deck, and generates the game logic.
Visualization: It generates custom card assets and artwork on the fly.
Play: It deploys a live multiplayer room where you and your friends can join and play immediately in the browser.

How we built it

We built a sophisticated "Universal Game Engine" that decouples game rules from the core logic, allowing AI to script the game behavior dynamically.

Frontend: Built with React and deployed on Vercel for a responsive, real-time interface.
AI Pipeline (hosted on Modal):
- Research: We use Perplexity Sonar to search the web for comprehensive, up-to-date rules for existing games.
- Logic Generation: We use Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet to convert those rules into a strict, proprietary JSON Game Schema (defining deck structure, turn phases, and win conditions) and a Python Plugin (handling complex mechanics like "stacking draw cards" or "blocking actions").
- Visuals: We use Flux to generate thematic artwork for the card faces and backgrounds based on the game's theme.
Backend & Infrastructure: The entire backend runs on Modal. We use Modal's sandboxing capabilities to safely execute and validate the AI-generated Python code before the game starts, ensuring the game is bug-free and playable.

Challenges we ran into

The "Universal" Problem: Designing a single JSON schema that could describe every possible card game was incredibly difficult. We had to abstract mechanics like "reverse turn order," "skip next player," and "reaction cards" (like Nope in Exploding Kittens) into a generalized event system.
AI Hallucinations: Early on, the AI would generate rules that didn't make sense (e.g., a deck with 0 cards). We solved this by implementing a validation step in a Modal sandbox that "test-runs" the generated game configuration to catch errors before the user sees them.
Real-time State Sync: Managing the game state for multiplayer sessions where rules change dynamically required a robust WebSocket architecture.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The Hybrid Engine: We're proud that we didn't just make a "text adventure." We built a real game engine where the AI writes actual Python code (plugins) to handle edge cases the JSON schema can't cover. This allows for complex logic like "challenging a Wild Draw 4" in Uno.
Instant Deployment: Going from a text prompt to a playable multiplayer link in under a minute is a huge technical feat involving three different AI models working in concert.
Sandboxed Safety: Successfully using Modal to sandbox the AI-generated code means our platform is secure, even though it executes arbitrary code generated by an LLM.

What we learned

Structured Output is Key: We learned that asking an LLM to "write code" is messy, but asking it to "fill out this specific JSON schema" yields incredibly reliable results.
Infrastructure Matters: Using serverless GPUs via Modal allowed us to scale our heavy AI workloads (like Flux image generation) without managing complex infrastructure.
Community: We learned the value of finding mentors early! Their feedback helped us narrow our scope from "all board games" to "card-based games," which made the project achievable in 36 hours.

What's next for Boardify

Board Support: Expanding our "Universal Engine" to support spatial boards (like Chess or Catan), not just card stacks.
Voice Mode: Adding a voice interface so you can argue about the rules with the AI dealer, just like in real life.
Persistent Campaigns: Allowing the AI to remember past games and evolve the rules over a series of sessions (Legacy-style games).