Shuffle Party • Shipped 2026
A song quiz built from my friends' own playlists
- Role
- Product design, Interaction design, Web
- Timeline
- October 2026
- Team
- Solo, with AI agents
- Tools
- Spotify Web API, Spotify Web Playback SDK, React, Vite, TypeScript, Node, WebSockets, GSAP, Railway, Claude Code, Codex
- Live
- Shipped
- Songs in my Liked Songs, so the game samples instead of loading everything
- 17,074
- Spotify requests to build one player's 30 song pool, before and after the fix
- 40 → 4
- Invited friends, the most Spotify allows an app in development
- 5
Shuffle Party is a name that song game for me and a few friends, each at home on their own phone. Every round plays a random song from one player's own Spotify library on every phone at once, and you race to type the title or the artist.
It runs privately for me and four friends. I made the product calls and designed every screen, and Claude Code and Codex wrote most of the code with me. The part worth reading is the morning Spotify paused the whole game, and what I changed on screen and under it.
Overview
I wanted a song quiz where every song comes from someone in the room.
Music quizzes usually play chart hits, so the winner is whoever listens to the most radio. With friends, the fun question is different: whose song is this, and how did nobody know they liked it?
Everyone logs in with Spotify, one song plays on every phone at the same moment, and points go to title, artist and speed. I gave it a loud sticker look instead of a Spotify lookalike, because it's a party game and it shouldn't pass as anything official.
Process
Songs come from friends' real libraries, not picks made for the game.
The easy build was letting each player pick five to ten songs. I said no. The picker already knows the answer, and picked songs show your best taste, not your real one. So each phone samples its owner's whole Liked Songs and their own playlists, and the reveal says whose library the song came from.
That made the library big. Mine has 17,074 liked songs, so the phone reads a few random pages instead of everything. The first real game with friends added the rest: their whole library instead of a 2,000 song cap, a pass button for songs nobody knows, a playlist picker, and volume inside the round, where the music actually plays.
Process
Spotify paused us on day one, so each song pool now takes 4 requests.
On the first morning of real games, Spotify's daily limit for apps in development ran out, and every player saw "Spotify didn't let us in. Try logging in again." Logging in again couldn't fix it. My own tests against my real library had helped use the limit up.
I cut the requests first. A 30 song pool went from about 40 single song reads to 4 pages of 50, the playlist list is remembered for six hours, a check that ran every round is gone, and blocked requests are never retried. Then I rewrote the screen to say what happened, that it's paused for everyone, and when to try again.
Reflection
It stays private for five friends, because Spotify's rules ban games.
Spotify's developer policy rules out games, trivia included, and an app in development tops out at five invited people. So it's free, unlisted, and I don't share the link. A public version would swap Spotify for 30 second previews from Deezer and lose the whose song is this moment, a trade I'd rather make on purpose than by accident.
What I'd change is the order. I built a fake Spotify that plays whole games with no account, and I should have tested there first and set a request budget before the first real game.