Party Times is a free, no-signup collection of multiplayer party games you play together from your phones. One person hosts and shares a link; everyone else joins in their browser. It works in the same room or over a Discord, Zoom, or Teams call.

Do you need an account to play party games on Party Times?

No. There are no accounts and no downloads. The host creates a lobby, shares the link, and players join by typing a name. It is built to be as low-friction as Jackbox.

Can AI agents find bugs in a codebase before launch?

Yes, if you scope them tightly. I ran several AI agents in parallel, each auditing one part of the code, then verified their findings against the running app instead of trusting the reports. They surfaced real issues, including an API key exposed in the client bundle and admin authentication that was only enforced in the browser.

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Building Party Times: A Free Jackbox-Style Party Game Site

Jul 2026 · AI & Building

Every time friends are over, or we are on a group call, someone asks the same question: what can we all play right now, without downloading anything or paying for another app? Jackbox is great, but you have to own it and someone has to run it. So I built Party Times — a free, no-signup site where one person hosts, shares a link, and everyone plays from their own phone.

Play Party Times

The whole thing is one link. The host screen-shares a leaderboard, everyone else joins on their phone, and there is nothing to install or sign up for.

It runs the puzzle games people already know how to play, turned into live multiplayer: a Wordle-style word race, a Connections-style grouping game, a fast mini crossword, the cooperative number game Ito, and a mascot-racing betting game with play money. Same idea as a party console, but it lives in a browser tab.

The Point Was Low Friction

The bar I set was simple: from "let's play something" to actually playing should take about thirty seconds, and nobody should have to make an account. That constraint drove most of the design.

Host creates a lobby and picks a game — no login
One tap copies an invite link that shows friends which game they are joining
Players join by typing a name, straight from the browser
The host’s leaderboard view is built to be screen-shared on Discord, Zoom, Teams, or a TV

The stack is deliberately boring: a React front end, a small Node backend, and Firestore for shared state, deployed on Google Cloud Run. Boring is good when the goal is "works at a party without me babysitting it."

The Part I Want to Talk About: Auditing It With AI

Building the thing was the easy half. Getting it launch-ready without shipping something embarrassing was the interesting half, and it is where I leaned hardest on AI.

Instead of asking one model to "review the code" — which produces a vague wall of text — I ran a fleet of agents in parallel, each with a narrow assignment: one on each game, one on the state-sync core, one on security and cost, one on launch and SEO readiness. Tight scope, one job each.

Then I did the part most people skip: I did not trust the reports. AI audit summaries are leads, not findings. I took each serious claim and verified it against the actual running app before believing it. That step matters, because a confident, well-written finding can still be wrong.

What The Audit Actually Caught

The findings were real, and a few were the kind of thing that quietly bites you after launch:

An API key baked into the browser bundle. The AI hint feature called Google’s Gemini directly from the client, which meant the key shipped in the public JavaScript for anyone to lift and run up a bill on. I moved it behind the backend so the key never leaves the server.
Admin controls that were only locked in the browser. The host password was checked in the front end, but the server would happily accept commands from anyone who knew the lobby code. I added a real per-lobby secret the server actually checks.
No cleanup of abandoned game lobbies. There was a cap on concurrent lobbies, but nothing ever freed the dead ones, so the site would eventually refuse everyone. Now idle lobbies get swept automatically.
A multiplayer race condition where two players acting at the same instant could silently drop one of them from the game. Fixed by making that update atomic on the server.

None of these were exotic. They are exactly the boring, load-bearing mistakes that are easy to make solo and easy to miss without a second set of eyes. Using AI as several focused sets of eyes — and then checking its homework — caught them before real people did.

Why This Is A Good Way To Build

Party Times is not a startup. It is a useful thing I wanted to exist, built small enough to actually finish. That is the same pattern I keep coming back to: pick a real problem, build the smallest version that works, use AI to move faster, and verify the results instead of trusting them.

The multiplayer party-game version of that loop is fun because the feedback is instant. If a game is confusing or breaks, you find out the second you play it with friends. That is the best possible test environment.

If building this way is interesting to you — shipping small useful things with AI and being honest about what worked and what didn’t — I collect the notes and mistakes in the free AI community. No course, no paywall. Just people learning by shipping.