Twisted Tales

Twisted Tales is a social mystery card game of lateral thinking where players work together like detectives to reconstruct bizarre, macabre, or seemingly impossible situations.

New to the game? See How to Play.

Want to add or change cards? See Adding and Editing Cards.

This repository contains a small web prototype that shows one card at a time, in English or Spanish. The UI is designed mobile first, for players using a phone.

Run it locally

Requirements: Go 1.22 or newer.

go run .

Then open http://localhost:8080. To use another port, set the PORT environment variable:

PORT=3000 go run .

Cards are embedded into the binary, so restart the server after adding or editing a card.

Tech stack

• Go, standard library only (net/http, html/template, embed, encoding/json), no external dependencies.
• Cards are JSON files in resources/, named xxx-smalltitle-LANG.json (e.g. 001-glass-of-water-EN.json), with title, prompt and solution fields. Every card must exist in every language (EN and ES).
• Frontend is server-rendered HTML and CSS in templates/card.html. A small inline script (no libraries) makes Back, Next and Show/Hide solution fetch the card as JSON from GET /api/cards/{n}?solution=1 and update only the card instead of reloading the page; without JavaScript they are ordinary links.
• User state (selected language and current card) is remembered in browser cookies, so the server stores nothing. Reopening the site resumes where you left off. Cookies are marked Secure when served over https, and still work on plain http://localhost.

Testing

go test ./...   # unit and HTTP route tests
go vet ./...    # static checks
gofmt -l .      # lists files that need formatting (no output means all good)

The tests cover card loading (ordering, language suffixes, EN/ES parity and error cases), page navigation, and the HTTP routes (redirect, 404s, solution hidden by default, language switch, help section, saved language and card cookies). Because they load the real files in resources/, adding a card without its translation makes them fail.

For a quick visual check, run go run . and open http://localhost:8080.

Credits

Many of the cards were adapted from yesnogame.net, which publishes these situation puzzles in several languages. Where a puzzle was available in only one language there, the other language is our own translation. Thanks to the authors and community behind that site.