Between Christmas and New Year, my friends and I rented a house in the middle of nowhere in Denmark. Someone brought a battered copy of the 1964 hotel-empire classic 'Acquire'. We played it every single night: founding chains, forcing mergers, going to bed at 3 a.m. calculating who really held the majority.
We tried to play as much as possible, knowingly that when January comes, we'd all scatter back to our own cities. But we wondered, can it be that hard to code this game using AI? Probably not. So I gave myself a brief: build a version that feels like the board on the table, the click of a tile, the drama of a merger, the greed of the stock phase, not a spreadsheet with a chat window. And use AI aggressively enough that one designer could ship a multiplayer game in evenings and weekends.
So on January 4th, I prompted in Lovable, not yet knowing what was ahead.
Challenge 01
Make cardboard feel tactile
A board game lives on feedback you don't get from a database row: the snap of a tile, everyone leaning in when a chain is founded. The web version had to earn that feeling back. Playable tiles pulse, placement is a single click with a small flight-and-pop animation, every event has its own sound, and founding a chain interrupts you with a decision, exactly like the table does. Just as important is what the interface refuses to do: illegal moves simply aren't clickable. The UI is the rulebook, so nobody ever reads one.
Challenge 02
Choreograph the scariest rule
On the table, mergers cause stress: count all hotel tiles, see which one is the bigger chain. Who gets paid what, in which order do defunct shares get sold, traded or kept? Online, the server resolves all of it automatically, and the interface plays it back as a story:
The takeover is announced, bonuses are paid on screen, tiles flip to the survivor's color one by one. For the hardest decision (sell, trade or keep your defunct shares), the final UI uses sliders with a live post-trade portfolio preview, so you don't need to calculate yourself. A direct result of watching my friends hesitate on the tabletop, what to do next as the financially best move forward.
