Shiny-based memory game

A fun project for a friend’s birthday

One of my friends really likes the UK TV show Taskmaster, and so do I. So when her birthday was coming up, I made her a fun game based on Taskmaster quotes in the best way I could think of: a Shiny app!

The game design is very simple. There are 8 pairs of cards, face down in a grid. The player must find all matching pairs by flipping over two cards at a time. But instead of having pairs of identical images, the pairs are a quote, item, or action, and the person most closely associated with it.

While it’s just about the simplest game imaginable in real life, implementing it as a Shiny app came with various challenges to get all mechanisms right. At the same time, both the server logic and the Taskmaster-style theming proved to be great opportunities for some experimentation with Positron Assistant.

In addition, I could practice my web scraping skills by extracting quotes from the Taskmaster Wiki and had fun choosing my favorite out-of-context quotes. This was also my first time using Posit Connect Cloud instead of shinyapps.io, and I was very pleased with the experience.

Want to play the game? Try it here!