Foursure

A daily word puzzle: find the four groups of four connected words, NYT Connections-style. Groups are proposed by anyone, moderated by an admin, and assembled into puzzles by hand from the approved pool via the admin page; publishing the oldest queued puzzle each day is the only automatic step. No accounts, no framework, no build step — game progress lives entirely on-device in IndexedDB.

Ships as both a website (https://foursure.elliscode.com) and a packaged KaiOS feature-phone app — same frontend/ source for both. See "KaiOS packaging" under Frontend below.

Repo layout

Path	What it is
frontend/	The puzzle page (index.html) and the admin moderation panel (admin.html) — plain HTML/CSS/JS. Also holds the KaiOS packaging bits (manifest.webmanifest, kaios-release.sh) — see "KaiOS packaging" below. See backend/README.md for the routes they call.
backend/	The Lambda API (group submission, admin moderation, puzzle generation) + DynamoDB. See backend/README.md.
s3/	Static hosting root for the deployed site: the built frontend, the daily puzzle JSON files (plus 8 hand-authored default00N.json fallbacks), the blog, and submit-group.html (a standalone page, not part of frontend/ — see below).

Features

For players:

• Today's puzzle (index.html) — a 4x4 grid, select 4 tiles and submit; wrong guesses cost one of four chances and shake the board; a full solve/fail shows a recap grid. A calendar picker lets you play any past date (down to an optional floor, puzzles/manifest.json's firstPuzzleDate, if one's been set); if no puzzle was published for a pickable date, one of 8 hand-authored default puzzles loads instead (deterministically chosen by day-of-year, so a given date always shows the same one). Every attempt is saved to IndexedDB per-date, so reloading or coming back later picks up exactly where you left off.
• Submit a group (submit-group.html, linked from the puzzle page) — anyone can propose 4 words + the category connecting them. Submissions are anonymous and go into the moderation queue.

For moderation:

• admin.html — phone-OTP-gated review tool. Approve, reject, or edit any submitted group (editing rejects the original and creates a new, already-approved replacement — the original submission is never deleted). Its "Build Puzzle" tab is also where puzzles actually get assembled: an admin manually picks 4 approved groups and assigns each a difficulty to build a puzzle, which then just waits in a queue to be published.

Architecture

Puzzle page (frontend/index.html) — served either as the website or as a
packaged KaiOS app (running from http://foursure.localhost)
  ├─ static puzzle data (S3, always fetched as an absolute
  │  https://{brand}.elliscode.com/... URL -- foursure.elliscode.com by
  │  default, or foursure.elliscode.com if that's the domain actually
  │  serving the page -- regardless of which of the two origins above
  │  served the page) — puzzles/YYYY-MM-DD.json, falling
  │  back to one of 8 rotating puzzles/default00N.json if that date has
  │  nothing published, plus puzzles/manifest.json (just a firstPuzzleDate
  │  floor for the calendar picker) — no auth
  └─ API (Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB)
       ├─ /submit-group                                  — public group submission
       └─ /admin/*                                        — moderation (phone-OTP admin login)

Puzzle generation — the same Lambda, triggered by an EventBridge scheduled
rule instead of API Gateway — publishes the oldest admin-built puzzle still
in the queue, assigning it the next sequential id, and writes tomorrow's
puzzle straight to S3.

Backend

Single Python 3.14 Lambda (no framework), one DynamoDB table (key1/key2 single-table design), no build step. Full route list, environment variables, and one-time AWS setup steps are in backend/README.md.

cd backend && sh release.sh

Frontend

Static HTML/CSS/JS, no framework or build step. puzzle.js is adapted from a sibling project's Connections implementation; see its comments for what changed (IndexedDB instead of a server round trip, no D-pad navigation).

cd s3 && sh release.sh   # copy frontend/ in and sync the whole s3/ root up (except puzzles/, which is bucket-managed)

KaiOS packaging

frontend/manifest.webmanifest + frontend/kaios-release.sh produce the zip submitted to the KaiOS store — same pattern as kaios-calorie-counter. admin.html is deliberately excluded from the package (it's a web-only moderation tool); puzzles/ was never part of frontend/ in the first place — the packaged app fetches puzzle data live from https://foursure.elliscode.com (or https://foursure.elliscode.com, whichever brand that build is stamped for) instead of carrying a local copy, since a submitted package can't be re-uploaded daily for tomorrow's puzzle (see backend/README.md).

cd frontend && sh kaios-release.sh

Requires frontend/assets/icons/kaios_56.png/kaios_112.png to exist first (design assets, not checked in).