Personal
The world needs a better Farkle app
Farkle is an old dice game with complicated scoring that I play several times a week. There were limited options in the App Store for a decent scoring companion, so I decided to build my own.
I wanted my Farkle app to be fun to elevate what would be a simple scoring experience.
Challenge
My wife and I discovered Farkle at a toymaker's shop in St. Augustine and immediately fell in love. Farkle is a push-your-luck dice game created sometime in the 17th century. Scoring happens with a set of six dice, with the winner being the first to score 10,000 points.
Approach
Existing Farkle scoring apps were too complicated and looked terrible. I wanted something fun and easy to use every day, something with personality and that made scoring super quick.
I knew very little of iOS development, so I used Claude Code to help me bootstrap a prototype that I could test with friends and family.
A few rounds of prototypes created in Xcode got plenty of play testing with friends and family.
Focus on scoring
Scoring is the core of the game, so I wanted to make sure it was easy to use and understand. I landed on a stacked progress bar approach that let any number of players keep track of their relative score.
Farkle plays to 10,000 so I wanted a fun widget to keep track of progress.
Ongoing refinements
I'm still learning iOS development and how to translate my design ideas into code. I've made a lot of progress, but there's still a lot to learn. While we've only had a few paid downloads, I use the app almost every day to get a quick game of Farkle in with my wife or friends.
v2 of What the Farkle is coming soon with a few new features and a few bug fixes.