Matchimals.fun

1. 1-4 players take turns connecting the top card from the deck to the existing cards on the table.
2. If there isn't a valid connection to be made, then the player must pass.
3. The game ends when all the cards from the deck have been connected on the board.

Matchimals.fun was built as a proof-of-concept by Chris Heninger (@chrisheninger) and Hannah Heninger (@mshannahnv). The gameplay is inspired by a 1959 card game called Busy Bee. 🐝 🃏

Matchimals.fun is made for kids of all ages. It aims to provide entertainment and improve pattern recognition skills through fun visuals of animals, colors, and numbers.

This project is sponsored by iGravity Studios– a custom software shop with an emphasis on UI/UX development– based in Phoenix, Arizona. 🏜 ❤️

This game has been made open source to help others looking to learn more about JavaScript, BoardGame.io, and React-Native applications.

Find a bug or have a question? Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request!

This is an Expo app using continuous native generation — the ios/ directory is generated from app.json and not checked in. You'll need bun, Xcode, and CocoaPods installed.

1. Fork the repo
2. Install dependencies: bun install
3. Build and run the app in the iOS simulator: bun run ios
4. Or run the web version: bun run web

The app icons are rendered from the animal SVGs: bun run generate:icons regenerates the primary icon, the per-animal alternate icons (pick one under Settings on iOS), and the web icons — commit the output.

Screenshots for the App Store and this README come from the simulator: bun run screenshots builds a Release app, then boots an iPhone 14 Plus (App Store Connect's required 6.5" iPhone slot, 1284 × 2778 px) and an iPad Pro 13-inch (the 13" slot, 2064 × 2752 px) and, for every storefront language, plays a two-player game on the iPhone and a four-player game on the iPad — the five board snapshots in src/Matchimals/snapshots.ts followed by the victory card, with the fixed players from src/screenshots.ts, each reached through a https://www.matchimals.fun/?screenshot=<state> universal link. Numbered PNGs land in screenshots/<storefront>/<display>/ in upload order (the storefront folders use App Store Connect's locale codes, like store/metadata/) — commit them; they are what gets uploaded to App Store Connect. Add --skip-build to reuse the last build, or --locales "en-US ja" for a subset.

Captions go on afterwards: bun run screenshots:caption lays every caption set in store/captions/ (family, travel, no-ads — display → state → storefront locale → text, two lines at most, set in Dimbo) over those screenshots, setting each one under the caption on the main menu's trianglify background (--frame card|bleed|slide|device picks how: a sticker card, edge to edge, a slide with rounded top corners, or real device art from store/frames/ — card unless asked), and writes screenshots-captioned/<set>/<storefront>/<display>/ at the same slot sizes, recording the frame in screenshots-captioned/<set>/frame.json so a set is never a mix of two — commit those too. bun run asc:listing --screenshots-dir screenshots-captioned/family puts a captioned set on the main listing (--dry-run shows what would change); captioning needs ImageMagick (brew install imagemagick).

The app follows the device language: English, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Every user-facing string lives in src/locales/<locale>.ts — English is the source of truth and defines the Translations interface, so a missing key in any language is a type error — and components read them through t(), caps() (titles and buttons are capitalized at render, with the locale's rules), playersLabel() and animalName() from src/i18n.ts. Animal names are translated only at render: the English AnimalName stays the key everywhere (state, app icons, screenshot links). The display font Dimbo only has Latin glyphs, so displayFont resolves to the platform font (at a weight to match) for Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

• bun run check:locales fails on a missing key, a placeholder mismatch, a character Dimbo can't draw, or a string that overflows a fixed-width slot (measured in Dimbo), and checks store/metadata/ against App Store Connect's limits.
• bun run screenshots:locales photographs every language on the iPhone and iPad simulators (main menu, Settings, the longest animal names on the nameplates and the victory card, the in-game menu, the animal chooser) into build/locale-screenshots/, with a contact sheet per language.
• bun scripts/translations-review.mjs regenerates store/translations-review.md, every string beside its English source for native speakers to review.

To add a language: copy src/locales/en.ts, register it in src/locales/index.ts (and in resolveLocale's fallbacks if a bare language should map to it), add it to CFBundleLocalizations in app.json, create store/metadata/<App Store locale>/, then run the three commands above. The App Store listing for each storefront (name, subtitle, keywords, promotional text, description, release notes) is kept in store/metadata/ and pasted into App Store Connect by hand.

iOS releases are built and uploaded entirely locally (no EAS subscription or fastlane required):

bun run deploy:ios

The script (scripts/deploy-ios.sh) auto-increments ios.buildNumber in app.json (and commits the bump), runs expo prebuild, archives with xcodebuild, uploads the build straight to App Store Connect, then tags the commit (ios-v<version>-<build>) and pushes. It refuses to run unless you're on a clean main and the typecheck passes. If the upload step fails, fix the cause and run bun run deploy:ios --upload-only to re-upload the archive it already built. App version bumps (expo.version) are still manual — edit app.json before deploying a new release.

Signing and the upload authenticate with an App Store Connect API key if one is installed on the Mac: ~/.private_keys/matchimals-asc.env sets ASC_KEY_ID and ASC_ISSUER_ID, and the key's AuthKey_<id>.p8 sits beside it (ASC → Users and Access → Integrations → App Store Connect API; the App Manager role is enough). Without one, the Apple ID signed into Xcode (Xcode → Settings → Accounts) is used for the team in app.json — that session lapses after a few hours, which is the usual reason an upload fails. Xcode creates the certificates and profiles it needs either way. Nothing secret is stored in the repo.

The web version deploys automatically via Netlify when main is pushed (bun run build:web for a local static export to dist/).

Nicolo Davis and collaborators for the turn-based game engine boardgame.io.

Facebook and collaborators for the wonderful libraries React and React-Native.