Background#
We hosted our neighborhood for Super Bowl LX this year and I wanted a fun, easy way for everyone to coordinate who’s bringing what food and to run Super Bowl Squares digitally instead of the usual paper grid taped to the wall.
It’s just a link I could text to the neighbors that would let them sign up for the potluck, claim squares, and see everything update in real time. Hosted on Cloudflare’s generous free tier and services.
Features#
Potluck Board with an AI twist. Families sign up with what they’re bringing, grouped by household. Everyone can see the full spread at a glance so you don’t end up with six bags of chips and no dip. And the AI “Party Coach” (powered by Gemini Flash) looks at what’s already been claimed and suggests complementary dishes. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of dips, how about some sliders or a dessert?” It added a nice touch of personality to the whole thing.
Super Bowl Squares. A fully digital 10x10 grid. $1 per square, random number assignments, quarter-based payouts. No more passing around a crumpled piece of paper and trying to read someone’s handwriting.
I also built a simple admin panel so I could enter scores at each quarter and the app would automatically figure out the winner and update everyone in real time.
How It Was Built#
- React Router + Vite for a lightweight frontend that runs well and has server-side rendering optimized for Cloudflare workers on the edge. Vite for a fast dev server and optimized production builds.
- Cloudflare Wrangler for infrastructure as code and automatic deployments.
- Cloudflare Workers for serverless API endpoints handling potluck signups, square claims, and score updates.
- Cloudflare D1 as the database. SQLite at the edge for storing potluck items, the squares grid, and game state.
- OpenRouter + Gemini Flash powers the AI “Party Coach” that analyzes what’s been claimed and suggests complementary dishes.
- Real-time polling with a version-keyed cache strategy so everyone’s view stays fresh without hammering the API and running into Cloudflare’s D1 request limits.
Built with Claude. Started Saturday night while watching the Winter Olympics and sent out our invites Sunday morning.
Fun project and I could see iteration on it for next year’s game or setting it up to allow others to use it for their own parties.