The seventh Cyber-Jack app is live, and it breaks the pattern. Every app before it was a mobile app built in Expo. Letterly is a game, it runs in the browser, and the first playable version went out the same day I started it.
Play it at letterly.cyber-jack.uk. No download, no account.
What it is
One letter. Ten categories. Ninety seconds. Name something in each category that starts with the day's letter, and the whole world gets the same letter and the same ten categories that day. Then your answers are scored on how original they are. Pick something nobody else thought of and you score high. Pick the obvious answer and you score low, even if it is correct.
There is a daily streak, a share card, and private friend leagues with a six-character join code. The honest pitch is: it is the kind of thing you play once a day with the family group chat, not the kind of thing you grind for hours.
Why a web game, and why now
Two reasons. The first is that the format is oddly empty on mobile. Plenty of newspapers run a daily categories game on their websites, but nobody has shipped the simple async version: one shared daily round, originality scored, leagues with friends. The gap was real.
The second reason is honest curiosity. I have shipped the same Expo and in-app-purchase stack four times now. I wanted to know how fast I could ship something good on a completely different stack with no app store in the loop. The answer turned out to be: a teaser the first day, and a real multiplayer game inside two weeks.
The scoring problem nobody warns you about
Originality scoring sounds simple. Count how many players gave each answer, award more points to the rare ones. The trouble is the first player every day answers into an empty room, so everything they type is unique and everything scores full marks. That is not a game, that is a participation trophy.
The fix was a seed pool: a baseline of common answers per letter and category, hand-built, that dilutes the obvious picks from the very first play of the day. Type "Apple" for a fruit starting with A and the seed pool already knows half the world would too, so it scores low. Type something genuinely odd and you still get rewarded. The seeds fade in influence naturally as real players pile in.
There is also a quiet language check behind the scenes that decides whether an answer is a real example of its category, so "Dog" does not pass as a country. It defaults to accepting your answer if the check ever fails, because punishing a player for an outage is the wrong way round.
What is free
All of it. Letterly is free to play, no account, nothing behind a wall. It is a web game whose whole job is to be shared, and you do not put a turnstile in front of the thing you want people to pass along. If a native wrap and any paid extra ever happen, that is a later decision earned by people actually playing.
The honest state of it
It works, it is live, and a few dozen people have played. That is a start, not a hockey stick. Web games are hard to get discovered, harder than apps in some ways, because there is no store browsing for you. The plan is to let the share card do the work and see whether the daily habit sticks before spending real effort on reach.
A couple of things have already been fixed in public since launch: the daily letter was landing in a near-alphabetical pattern because of a weak random step, and the scoring copy needed rewriting so people understood that obvious answers score low by design. Both done, both shipped without disturbing past rounds so league standings stayed fair.
If you have ninety seconds, go play today's round. If you beat me, tell me.
Numbers
- Commits: 51
- First commit to first playable: one day
- Apps live: 3 (GutLedger, ListLedger, Letterly)
- Apps in testing: 1 (Odomo)
- Apps in dev: 2 (Inkframe, Settle)