Hi all! Botzee is an app that lets you play a text-based dice game right in Slack. If you’re familiar with Yahtzee you should pick it up really quick, and even if you aren’t it’s an easy game to learn.

It has single player, multiplayer, and some simple AI bots. I also just recently added an MMO variant, which allows all players to compete in a single, giant world-wide game (in a completely privacy-conscious way).

With more people spending all day isolated, I hope it can be a source of fun and social time for teams, groups of friends, families, etc. I’ve gotten a few really nice notes from folks lately about how it’s been a welcome distraction from the daily grind. The app does include a few donation buttons, but it is truly free to play, and I have no expectations of making money off it. I’m sharing it simply because I think it’s fun and I’m happy with where it’s at. I make and maintain it entirely so I can play with my friends, but I hope others can take advantage of it as well.

For those interested in the architecture, it’s a fairly standard serverless app running on AWS. All requests go through API Gateway and are handled by a single monolithic Lambda function, and it uses DynamoDB for data storage. The total cost for running it last month was 17 cents. As you would expect, it handles the periodic, bursty nature of this kind of app very well. It’s been fun project to pick away at over the last few years. I often use it to test new AWS features before bringing them into projects at work, and I quite like the Slack API and app platform, so coming up with ways to integrate new features from there is always an interesting exercise.

I hope you enjoy it, stay safe out there!

PS. If you’re looking for a way to spice up your Botzee games, consider a battle royale style tournament, where the lowest scoring player is eliminated each game, until a champion is crowned!