Jellybrawl

A party game for your TV and everyone’s phones

About

A living-room party game. The TV is the shared screen; everyone plays on their own phone, with a selfie (or a doodle) as the face of their jelly blob. Minigames are free-for-alls, 2v2 to 4v4 team games and lopsided 1-vs-the-rest showdowns, strung together as a playlist, a board game with crowns to buy, or a rapid-fire microgame gauntlet. The VIP (the first phone to join) sets the night up while everyone else votes.

  • 39 minigames: flapping free-for-alls, blob soccer, a sniper hunting look-alikes, a kaiju in a neon city, tug of war, a bomb to defuse with the manual split across phones, drawing and voting, tilt mazes…
  • Phones do more than buttons: sticks, trackpads, tilt, drawing, private maps and secret info.
  • Three ways to play: a playlist where last place picks the next game, three boards with forks, shops and duels, and a microgame gauntlet with bosses.
  • Boards in 3D: a harbor city, a slime-soaked sewer works and an erupting volcano island, drawn as a synthwave hologram, with a camera that rides along on every turn (or a flat 2D board, on slow machines or by choice).
  • A setup wizard: the VIP picks the mode, the map, the games and the rules on their phone; everyone else votes, and can practice any game first.
  • From another house: friends elsewhere play along on a remote screen (a TV, a laptop, an iPad) that shows the game live, or on Just this phone: the game on top of the controls, like a DS. Each press is judged by what that player saw, so a bit of lag doesn’t cost them.
  • Bots with personas: a Racer, a Miser, a Bully, a Rebel and a Wildcard, each with its own plan on the board and its own style in the minigames.
  • Nobody sits out: knocked-out players drop goo on the players still in and send emoji. Past eight players, the rest join the crowd, who can do that all night and vote on the games.
  • The look: neon on black with an old-TV (CRT) filter, which you can turn down or off.
  • Accessibility settings: reduced motion, text size, color-blind shapes, brightness, CRT level, a flat 2D board.

Every game

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Modes

How a night works

Play & host

To play: open Run game on the TV and scan its QR code with each phone. Phones connect straight to the TV (peer-to-peer), so put them on the same Wi-Fi as the TV. One device? Play on this phone splits the screen.

Friends somewhere else? They join with the same room code, and each phone that isn’t on the TV’s Wi-Fi is asked how it’s playing: open rickymetz.com/watch on a TV, laptop or iPad there for a remote screen (the phones in that house scan its code), or play on Just this phone, with the game on top. Up to 8 remote screens and phones can watch at once.

Host it yourself, with no internet needed on the night: run the relay on any computer on the same Wi-Fi (Node 18+, no dependencies):

git clone https://github.com/rickymetz/rickymetz.com
cd rickymetz.com/public/ideas/jellybrawl
node server.mjs

It prints a TV link and a phone link; the TV shows a QR code for the phones.