Pictionary

What games do you play with your friends?

I have a small circle of friends I’ll say, but we are kinda close. We tend to play many games when we are together, including Chess, Scrabble, Dumb Charades, and many more. The game which we like the most, however, would be pictionary. It is a really simple and lovely game if you ask me. There are two teams, each team has two types of players, the artists and the guessers. Each team has their turn to draw and guess a word that is provided by the rival team. The team that has the most number of guesses in a stipulated amount of time wins.
Even though we are a small circle of people, we typically have 4-6 people to play each time and thus, we end up forming two teams and playing the game in a standard way. Since sometime now, however, we tried to play but many people didn’t show up, and we were just 2 or 3 people. Now a days everyone is kind of busy as our college life is coming to an end and we are expected to search for and work on a dissertation as a part of our MS degree. So, I had a plan in my mind. The next time we play, I had thought of making a random word generator that will generate words from a specified list or dictionary at random and then one person has to draw while all others can be guessers. This includes more people in a given round of the game as opposed to the standard game because here no one knows the word and thus everyone can participate as a guesser.
Thus began another small struggle to develop a short app that runs on windows or android and that can generate random words at the click of a button. As I prefer python, I used tkinter and made a simple GUI for windows that can generate words at random. It was a fruitful effort and I indeed could come up with a code for the same which is really easy. You can check it out here.

I feel really good after this, as now I feel like I can solve real world problems (even if they are very small in scale) with programming and that helps. I used auto-py-to-exe to convert the tkinter GUI to a full fledged windows application that can now be run on laptops of my friends too. Share your stories of how programming helped you in your day to day life in the comments below.