I have a group of friends of Uni with whom I have a whatsapp group. I rarely participate, but as of late they're sending memes about names or phrases that you are meant to guess made by inferences in the image. Some of these memes are illustrated with emojis.
I thought: "Oh I can make a game like this in minutes with AI" and that was true, except that the riddles were either appalling, unguessable, or stupid. So I modified what Claude had created, resorting mostly to inside jokes or knowledge to create sequences of emojis that only my friends from uni would understand. So, for example, if we nicknamed a classmate "Cabeza", I put an emoji for 🗿, and writing "cabeza" will be correct and take you to the next stage.
I noticed just how much the entertainment factor increased with inside jokes, no matter how stupid. Despite the ugliness and the slop, I think there's something here to explore further. Not for my friends, but for anybody to create "games for their friends". Here are little vocabulary sets that are informally agreed upon by the tribe, and you're expected to know them all.
The weather forecast for this weekend in Madrid is sadly rainy (sadly because it's just starting to get warm), but perhaps it's the best time to hole up and get creative. Yesterday it came almost by accident: I came out of concert at 11pm, answered a message to the group, walking home while thinking about the game, started prompting at 11:30 and was done within an hour, manual creation of stages and everything.
My group of friends loved it, I should explore this more.