Building a Qwirkle scorekeeping app

I recently bought the board game Qwirkle. It’s a clever little game where you build lines of tiles by matching either colors or shapes. For me, it hits a sweet spot between relaxed gameplay and just-enough strategy (though nothing will ever beat Rummikub). I’ve always liked Qwirkle, but I never bought it because I struggled to distinguish some of the colors under certain lighting conditions. When I discovered a new edition with subtle symbols on the tiles for better accessibility, I ordered it immediately.

Keeping score in Qwirkle is simple, but it has to be done constantly. After every turn, you write down how many points you scored, similar to Scrabble. After our first game, I caught myself thinking about how nice a small digital scorekeeper app would be. But I also quickly realized that I’m too lazy to actually build it.

A few years ago, that’s where the story would have ended. But with the recent “vibe coding” wave, I was curious how far I could get without writing any code myself. After all, building a simple scorekeeping app should be a perfect fit for vibe coding, right?

I used GPT-5 in thinking mode to generate a minimal webpage. I asked it to keep things straightforward; no frameworks or libraries other than Tailwind for styling and to “make it fun.” The first version worked, technically, but the UI was clumsy and its idea of fun involved aggressive colors and way too many emojis. From there, I iterated: describe what felt off, regenerate, refine, repeat. After around twenty iterations, I ended up with a small, clean scorekeeper that does exactly what I need.

I’m quite happy with how it turned out. Even though I didn’t write (or even inspect) the code, it still feels like something I built. Though that might just be the IKEA effect in action. The app is hosted on GitHub Pages at qwirkle.bartm.be and all source code lives on GitHub. Now, back to playing Qwirkle.