Creating an Open Space Facilitation Card Game

Then I did what most people do. I parked the idea.

Then I forgot about it.   For a while.  Then, recently, I picked it back up again.

It was the friction around turning a physical concept like this into something interactive that stopped me. That would normally mean a fair bit of effort. Design decisions, frontend work, state management, hosting…and lots of my time.

This time, I approached it differently.

I leveraged AI.  I treated the build less like engineering and more like shaping. By feeding in the rules, nudging the structure, breaking things apart when they got too tangled. Keeping an eye on how it felt rather than obsessing over how it was written.

A couple of hours later, there was something real. Something recognisably the thing I had in my head.

Over a few evenings, spending an hour here and there, it turned into a working prototype. Something that looked decent, behaved as expected, and could realistically be used in a session.

There were bumps along the way. Questions around how keys were handled, what should and shouldn’t live in a URL, how to stop things being easily manipulated. The kind of stuff that matters once something moves beyond “just a demo”.

I wasn’t buried in syntax or wrestling with layout quirks for hours. I was making decisions. Breaking things into components. Thinking about how the experience should flow. Adjusting structure so it didn’t collapse under its own weight.

More like shaping clay than laying bricks.

If I’d tried to build this the traditional way, it probably would have dragged out over weeks or months. Not because it’s massively complex, but because all the small decisions stack up. And somewhere along the way, the energy dips and you shelve it or just give up. 

It felt closer to getting an idea out of your head before it has time to fade.  There’s a broader point in here, that this isn't about tools replacing people. It’s about how experience gets used.

Give this kind of capability to someone without experience, and you’ll likely get something that works… until it doesn’t. 

Code freely available. 

I’ve put the prototype up and made the code available here if you want to explore, or run your own sessions with it.

It’s still evolving. Like most things worth keeping around.

But it started with a simple problem: how do you help a room full of people have better conversations without over-controlling them?

Turns out, sometimes the answer is just a small deck of cards… and a nudge in the right direction.