The Impostor.

The Impostor is a party game that lives inside my Lab: everyone gets the same secret word except one person, the impostor, who has to fake it until they're caught or until they guess what's being talked about. You open it from a link, on your phone, with nothing to install.

The idea was to have a genuinely playable piece on the site, not a demo or a video: something anyone can open, understand in thirty seconds and start playing with whoever's next to them.

A secret-dealing game has an obvious temptation: build online rooms, accounts and a server to keep everyone in sync. All of that is the perfect excuse to never finish it.

The challenge wasn't technical, it was scope: what's the minimum for it to still be the same game and be playable right now, with a group around a table?

I stripped the game down to its skeleton: hand out the word in secret, give clues in turns, debate and reveal. I modeled it as a four-phase state machine and built it as a self-contained client piece, with no backend.

The private dealing is solved by passing the phone: each player touches the screen, sees their word (or finds out they're the impostor) and hands it to the next. The device is the table; no accounts, no connection needed.

A single phone that goes around in v1; online play stays for later, without blocking the launch. Player names are remembered in the browser so the next game starts with a single tap.

Aesthetics integrated with the rest of the site (editorial, with the burgundy accent) rather than a separate game skin: the game is brand content. It lives in /lab like the others and passes the same quality gate before every change.

A game you can play at a single URL, with nothing to install, that anyone opens and understands in half a minute. The word bank grew to a thousand and works in Spanish and English depending on the site's language.

Scope is the most important design decision in a personal project. Defining what "done" means before starting is what got it shipped instead of staying forever in progress.

Keeping the essential rule and serving it clean beats copying every feature. That same pattern (passing the phone, editorial aesthetics, the same quality gate) is what I later reused in The Wolf and across the rest of the Lab.