Show HN: Card game where players write their own cards that get parsed into code

Wordbots is a long-running side project I’ve been working on on-and-off for the past ~7 years that I finally feel comfortable enough with to share with the HN community. It’s an online tactical card game (inspired by games like Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering), where players write their own cards in natural language, that gets parsed down to JavaScript. The English-to-JavaScript translation is handled by a semantic parser operating on a hand-crafted CCG grammar – kind of an “old-school” approach in this age of LLMs but one that performs quite well on the very constrained language of Wordbots cards. The resulting game gets pretty wacky as players can create all sorts of cards, though there are some game formats that try to produce more balanced gameplay as well (e.g. one format in which both players shuffle their decks together, and various draft formats). If you’re curious about how it all works, I made a write-up about it here: https://app.wordbots.io/how-it-works And if you want to chat about Wordbots beyond this thread, please don’t hesitate to join our discord at https://discord.wordbots.io/ . I’d love to hear any and all feedback. -Alex
Story Published at: May 9, 2023 at 08:31PM