How I Built Vocabulary: Quizingo's First Daily Word Game

I'm Karan, an indie developer who makes stuff on the internet.

About 2 years ago I got hooked on word games. Since then I've been hunting for new ones on every subreddit and Hacker News thread I can find. It started with Wordle, which I've played daily for two years now. A more recent addition to that daily ritual has been Tiled Words.

Before building anything, I sat down and worked out what a daily game actually needs to get right:

I already had Quizingo as a platform to build on top of. So the real question was: what daily game do I make?

One idea I kept coming back to was vocabulary. Everyone wants a bigger vocabulary, nobody wants to sit through flashcards for it. How do I make that fun and gamified?

Then it clicked - just take the Quizingo format and point it at words instead. Show a word, give 4 possible meanings, let the user pick the right one. The whole thing could be automated, which would generate a new quiz everyday without my intervention.

I started building, and the first prototype was ready within a day. The code wasn't the hard part building a pool of words good enough to pull a daily quiz from was. That ended up being the most time-consuming piece of the whole thing. A few minor additions to the existing game flow rounded it out.

You get a 3x3 grid of 9 words. For each one, you pick the correct meaning from the options below it.

Every cell runs on a color-coded timer: 10, 20, or 30 seconds.

I posted it across a few subreddits on 29th June, 2026

and within 24 hours it had pulled in a solid first batch of traffic. 111 visitors and 165 views. This was big for me.

A few people also dropped suggestions in the comments a log of past quizzes, and adding synonyms alongside the meanings. Both feel like solid additions. Planning to get them in soon.

Building this was a different kind of build than Quizingo itself. Quizingo took months of grinding through UI states and Redux flows. This took two days to prototype.

There's something satisfying about shipping something this small and watching strangers play it within hours of posting it somewhere. It's also the first time I shipped something so fast.

I don't know yet if Vocabulary becomes a real daily habit for people the way Wordle did for me. But as a first real attempt at the daily-game checklist I laid out above, I'm happy with where it landed.