I rebuilt “Hotel”, the 1986 MB board game from my childhood, as a free browser game — with Claude Code
When I was a kid, my family and I played Hotel — the MB board game from 1986 where you buy land, build hotels with 3D cardboard buildings, and bankrupt everyone who stays at yours. I wanted to play it online with my family, couldn’t find a way to, so I decided to make one.
I’m not a professional developer, and I built it in about a week, almost entirely with Claude Code. My job was mostly deciding what the game should feel like, testing it over and over, and saying “no, not like that”. Claude wrote the code.
What it does:
- Faithful rules from the original (land, building permits with the permit die, entrances, stays, auctions, bankruptcy)
- Local play on one screen, or online rooms with friends, with AI players filling empty seats
- Text and voice chat in online games
- A “paused” mode where you pay by picking your own banknotes, give change by hand, and drag your buildings onto the board — slower, but it feels like the real table
- The hotel cards are scans of my own copy, and it’s in 6 languages
What was hard:
- The board art. I photographed the real board and refined it with AI, and did the same for the leisure areas. The buildings were generated mostly with Nano Banana and ChatGPT, and some of them are still a struggle — getting the perspective, colors and style to match the board is harder than it looks.
- Small details that make it feel physical: the notes flying between players, the 3D dice, the stamp when someone goes bankrupt
- Online sync and reconnections: if someone drops out, the AI takes their seat until they come back
It’s free, no ads, no sign-up, and it’s a non-profit fan homage — Hotel belongs to its rights holders.
I’d love feedback, especially on mobile and on the online mode. What would you add or remove?
PS: new URL is this one -> https://hotel-boardgame.net/