Building the Table: Dev Diary #3 — The Tow Truck Game

I’ve written these diaries about shipping features. Bug fixes, TestFlight builds, what real phones teach you that a laptop never will.

This one’s different. This one’s about the best hour I’ve had since I started building this thing, and I wasn’t at a computer for a single minute of it.

I was supposed to be there in person

That was the plan. Get in the car, drive out, sit down at the table with my people, deal some cards. The whole reason I started building this game in the first place — that table, those people.

My car had other plans.

So there I am on the side of the road, waiting on a tow truck, watching the clock run down on an afternoon I’d been looking forward to. You know that specific flavor of disappointment. Not a tragedy. Just a small, sour “well, dang.”

I called to tell them I wasn’t going to make it. And somewhere in the middle of explaining about the tow truck and the wait and the whole mess, I heard myself say something else:

“It’s gonna be a while. Y’all want to play a few hands?”

The first hand

Here’s the part I’m still a little smug about.

Game’s to five. If you bid big and bring it home, you can get there in a single hand — a one-hander. Most nights that’s a story you tell about somebody else.

I won it on the first hand. Not a Boston — I didn’t need all thirteen books, and I want to be honest in print about exactly what happened. Just enough over six to clear five points before anybody had settled into their seat. Game over. Cards down.

Understand: this is my family. Nobody said “congratulations.” What I got was the sound of four people talking at once about how that was luck, how the cards were funny, how it wouldn’t happen twice.

It was perfect.

An hour on speaker phone

We played for about an hour. Game after game, everybody on speaker, phone propped up somewhere while a tow truck took its sweet time.

And here’s the thing I did not expect: it didn’t feel like a substitute. It wasn’t a lesser version of being there. There was trash talk. There were the same four opinions about the same one card. Somebody was definitely counting books out loud when they shouldn’t have been. The rhythm of the thing was exactly the rhythm of the thing.

I even used the share feature — the one we just spent a week fixing so it stops handing you a black box — and texted them pictures of the wins. Because obviously.

What it taught me as a builder

I want to be straight with you: officially, this was a test. Four people, four networks, real cellular, the exact scenario I’d been trying to manufacture for weeks. And yes, it did what tests do. We found things. Some of them are already fixed.

But that’s not what I’ll remember, and I’d be lying if I framed this as a testing win.

Somewhere in that hour I stopped watching for bugs. I forgot to look at the thing I built. I was just playing cards with my family, losing track of the score, arguing about a lead. The app got out of the way — and a thing you built getting out of the way is the highest compliment it can earn.

Every feature on my list exists to serve one moment: somebody who can’t be in the room is in the game anyway. I’ve written that sentence in planning docs. On the side of the road, with a dead car and a phone on speaker, I finally felt it.

That’s the whole reason for this. Not the graphics, not the badges, not the leaderboard. The fact that a broken-down car couldn’t keep me from the table.

Still shipping

The work continues — the App Store, more testing, the fixes that came out of that very hour. I’ll write those up properly next time.

But I wanted this one on the record first.

The table was never the wood. It’s whoever pulls up.