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Online Catan

This project was conceived when my friends and I were playing games online, and discovered that it cost money to play the 5+ player expansion in colonist.io (an online version of Catan). We thought "honestly we could probably have Claude write this," and so while we were playing that's what was going on in the background.

This was the first time I embraced agentic development for a personal project. Typically my goal with side projects is to sharpen my own skills, so I let LLM-generated code take a back seat, if I reach for it at all. But here we just wanted a game to play, so I took it as an opportunity to lean in harder than I'd be comfortable with at work.

Over the course of a week, we went from a Next.js template to a fully playable multiplayer game:

• Server-authoritative, pure TypeScript game engine
• Socket.IO for real-time communication
• State sanitization to prevent cheating (server sends your full hand but only counts for your opponents)

We iterated through prompts, GitHub issues, and playtesting sessions to get there, with Claude handling the bulk of the implementation while I directed architecture, reviewed changes, and identified edge cases.

It's deployed via GitHub Actions to Fly.io, and you can check it out at catan.olincb.me (open two tabs if you want to play solo). If you notice anything wrong, feel free to submit an issue!