Party games online tend to come in two kinds: a quiz app that wants everyone staring at the same screen, or a pile of separate sites, one per game, each with its own way of joining. Neither works on a night in, when half the room is on the sofa, one person has the remote, and nobody wants to install anything.
Shiba Trivia is one site for the whole evening. Someone creates a room, the TV shows a code and a QR code, and everyone joins from their own phone, with no app and no account needed. Then you play one game after another without anyone having to join again.
The games
- Quiz. Multiple choice, free answers and numbers, from a bank of a few thousand questions written in French rather than translated. Play it as a quick game, or hand one person the presenter’s console and put the board on the big screen.
- Undercover. Everyone gets a secret word except the impostors, whose word is close but not the same. Give clues, find them, vote.
- Incognito. Everyone knows where you are except the spy. Ask each other questions without giving it away, and accuse someone before the spy works it out.
- Petit Bac. A letter, a list of categories and a race to fill them in, with everyone voting on the answers that are a bit of a stretch.
- Mot de passe. Get the others to guess a word from clues of one, two or three words at most, against the clock.
- Bombe. A syllable comes up and you have to type a word containing it before the bomb goes off. The fuse is hidden, and it keeps burning while the bomb is passed round.
A few more are playable but still being tuned, behind their own button: a Family Feud-style buzzer game, a drawing game and Love Letter.
When it’s just you, there is a daily challenge with its own leaderboard, and a solo run that lasts as long as your lives do.
Built for a real living room
The hard part of a party game isn’t the questions, it’s the room. Phones lock, someone’s 4G drops, the host goes to get drinks. Shiba Trivia is built for that:
- The server keeps the game. Every room runs on an authoritative server, so the timer is the same on every phone and nobody’s answer counts twice.
- Leaving doesn’t break it. A dropped phone gets a few seconds to come back before the game stops waiting for it. If the host leaves a quick game, someone else takes over. If the presenter loses their connection, the game pauses until they’re back.
- Secrets stay secret. In Undercover and Incognito each phone only ever receives its own role. The big screen gets nothing until the reveal.
- Phones and a screen, or just phones. A TV or projector is a bonus, not a requirement. Games that need talking work over a video call too.
Under the hood
The games themselves live in a pure TypeScript engine, shared between the room server and the site, which makes every game testable without a browser. The rooms run on Cloudflare Durable Objects, the site is Next.js on top of Supabase, and the iOS and Android apps wrap the same site with Capacitor. Multiplayer end-to-end tests drive several browsers at once, and a load test fills a room with a hundred players.