A legal trivia game with neubrutalism design, 1,000+ questions, and an office you build one correct answer at a time.
The Story
The Ladder was one of my first building projects with Claude -- done in the macOS desktop app, before I'd ever touched the CLI. I wanted to try building something simple just for fun, and a legal trivia game felt like natural territory for a twenty-year litigator.
It turned into an exercise in learning about gamification. AI made that surprisingly easy -- I could research progression systems, reward mechanics, and engagement patterns in real time while building them. Claude was also essential for generating the question bank: over a thousand questions across a dozen legal categories, with explanations and difficulty tiers. That volume of accurate, categorized content would be impractical for one person to produce manually. I'd review every question for accuracy, but the drafting and structuring happened at a pace that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
What started as a quiz app became something more involved: a legal trivia game where you climb from 1L Student to Supreme Court Justice, answer questions across a dozen categories, earn money, and furnish a corner office.
Where We Are
Version 2 was a complete visual and mechanical overhaul. We landed on neubrutalism -- bold borders, geometric shapes, warm colors, thick outlines. It makes the whole thing look like nothing else, which was the point.
1,000+ Questions
Torts, Contracts, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Legal Ethics, Property, SCOTUS, Law Latin, and more.
Daily Challenge
A timed 10-question daily quiz with its own category rotation and leaderboard tracking.
Corner Office
100+ office decoration items — paper items, furniture, plants, even a shark. Earn money from correct answers, spend it on your office.
VS Mode
Challenge friends to head-to-head legal trivia. Share your results with custom overlays.
3 Difficulty Modes
Each category has questions scaled from "anyone could guess this" to "only a bar prep nerd would know."
Cross-Platform
Web version (HTML/CSS/JS) plus a native iOS app in SwiftUI. Same game, native everywhere.
The core game is nearly done. Getting here involved 47 documented design iterations before the neubrutalism direction locked in. The office diorama, the category cards, the progression system -- it all works.
Built with Claude
The visual direction was the second education. The first version had no personality. After trying several design directions, I found a neubrutalism example and knew that was it. From there it was rapid art direction -- borders, colors, spacing, the office-as-diorama concept -- 47 documented iterations before it locked in.
As a first project, The Ladder taught me the basics of how to work with Claude: how to describe what I wanted, how to iterate on design, how to review generated content for accuracy, and how to think about the gap between "it works" and "it feels right." Everything I built after this was faster because of what I learned here.
