Friend Findings

D R McCoy

September 2026

Context. Waiting for dinner at home with a group of friends. 4 to 5 people, fortnightly.

Concept one. The person cooking, the host, sends tasks to the others via the phone.

The concept is to stop making people use their phones when one person is busy, say making dinner.

Everyone puts their phones in the centre, arranged as a grid. The host creates a task and the grid shows a countdown. Once the countdown finishes it shows the task and everyone rushes to do it: find a red object and bring it here. Once the host agrees it is completed, they create another and it starts over.

This is a first basic concept, but it works.

Six phone screens showing joining, voting, placement, scoring and final results — Friend Findings screens

Four phone simulators showing the question-set vote — Voting for a question set

Host phone showing the task and three player phones showing the countdown — Countdown across the player phones

Host phone showing Find something circular and three player phones sharing the word circular over a water background — Task shared across the player phones

Preset tasks

Find something red
Find something older than you
Find something that makes a noise
Find the coldest thing you can
Find someone who has travelled the world and where

How it works

part	choice
server	one Cloudflare Worker; a Table Durable Object per game, a Directory for codes
transport	WebSocket; a phone that drops keeps its slot for 60 s
joining	4-letter table code, or the table is offered to phones on the same network
players	2 to 30 phones, plus guests without a phone; the host taps who got it
countdown	6 s
task time	10 s to 60 min, host’s choice; default 1 min
motion	one closed-form spring drives CSS and canvas, so the phones agree without exchanging a frame

Site: friendfindings.com

Code: github.com/dr-mccoy/friend-findings