
Show HN: Botzee is a free Slack app game similar to Yatzy - farski
https://botzee.farski.com
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farski
Hi all! Botzee is an app that lets you play a text-based dice game right in
Slack. If you’re familiar with Yahtzee you should pick it up really quick, and
even if you aren’t it’s an easy game to learn.

It has single player, multiplayer, and some simple AI bots. I also just
recently added an MMO variant, which allows all players to compete in a
single, giant world-wide game (in a completely privacy-conscious way).

With more people spending all day isolated, I hope it can be a source of fun
and social time for teams, groups of friends, families, etc. I’ve gotten a few
really nice notes from folks lately about how it’s been a welcome distraction
from the daily grind. The app does include a few donation buttons, but it is
truly free to play, and I have no expectations of making money off it. I’m
sharing it simply because I think it’s fun and I’m happy with where it’s at. I
make and maintain it entirely so I can play with my friends, but I hope others
can take advantage of it as well.

For those interested in the architecture, it’s a fairly standard serverless
app running on AWS. All requests go through API Gateway and are handled by a
single monolithic Lambda function, and it uses DynamoDB for data storage. The
total cost for running it last month was 17 cents. As you would expect, it
handles the periodic, bursty nature of this kind of app very well. It’s been
fun project to pick away at over the last few years. I often use it to test
new AWS features before bringing them into projects at work, and I quite like
the Slack API and app platform, so coming up with ways to integrate new
features from there is always an interesting exercise.

I hope you enjoy it, stay safe out there!

PS. If you’re looking for a way to spice up your Botzee games, consider a
battle royale style tournament, where the lowest scoring player is eliminated
each game, until a champion is crowned!

