v1.3.0 — Lightning Strikes, and Now It Speaks Spanish
v1.3.0 — Lightning Strikes, and Now It Speaks Spanish
This is the biggest night Quizify has had since launch. A brand-new bonus mode drops in without warning, a third language joins the table, the end of the game got a glow-up, and a long list of party-night touches landed on top of a quiet, thorough tune-up of everything underneath. Sixteen test builds went into getting it right.
Pour a drink — here's what's new.
⚡ A Lightning Round nobody sees coming
Somewhere in the middle of the game, the screen suddenly flips: five questions, fifteen seconds each, no breaks, no reveals until the end. The Lightning Round used to be something the host pressed a button for — now it strikes on its own, exactly once a game, at a round you can't predict. The room goes from comfortable to frantic in a heartbeat, and a recap at the end shows every right answer so you can see just how badly the speed got to you. Don't want the chaos? One toggle turns it off.
🌍 Now playing in Spanish
Quizify has spoken German and English since day one. Now it speaks Spanish too. The language picker quietly grows a flag for every language your packs actually carry, the whole interface translates, and a first Spanish pack — Geografía, 150 questions — ships in the box. Drop in your own es pack and it simply appears under the Spanish flag. The door is open for more languages with nothing but a pack and a translation file.
🖼️ Questions with a picture
Packs can now carry an image. "What film is this from?" "Name this landmark." The TV shows the picture above the question, phones show it beside the text with a tap to zoom in. Picture rounds were always the most fun part of a pub quiz — now they're part of yours.
🎵 Atmosphere while you wait
The lobby can hum with your own background music through a real Home Assistant speaker while the stragglers find the QR code, and the game answers back with sound — a chime when you're right, a buzz when you're not, a tick as the last five seconds drain away. A mute button in the corner keeps the peace when someone needs quiet.
🧩 A game that reads the room
The new Auto difficulty watches how the whole table is doing and gently steers the questions easier or harder so nobody gets buried and nobody gets bored. It's cautious on purpose — it nudges, it doesn't lurch — so the night finds its own level without anyone touching a setting.
🛠️ Bring your own questions
Hosts can now write or paste a question pack right in the setup screen, watch it get checked line by line, and submit it — Quizify hands it off to turn into a request on GitHub, no tokens ever touching your browser. The feature stays completely hidden until you opt in, so nothing changes unless you want it to.
🏆 A finish worth the wait
The end screen got rebuilt. The winner takes a banner of their own, the night's highlights line up in a tidy row you can swipe through, and the final standings read like a real scoreboard — each player's bar stretched to their score, with little ⚡ and 🔥 marks on whoever was fastest and whoever was hottest. And when the Freeze power-up catches you, a frosted ice card now slides over your screen with a countdown ring, so getting iced finally feels like getting iced.
🎴 Power-ups, made fair
Power-ups used to fall a little too freely — some players got showered, others got nothing. Now everyone gets at most one across the whole game, so when yours arrives it actually means something.
🔧 Under the hood
Behind all of that, Quizify got a top-to-bottom going-over: a 28-point automated review across correctness, security, concurrency, performance and tests — closed in full — plus reconnect and resume fixes, security hardening, and a large refactor that split the game server's tangled cores into clean, focused pieces. New automated gates now guard every future change. None of it shows on screen, and that's the point: the game just feels steadier.
🙏 Thank you
This release grew out of real games played and real notes sent back — the answer that stayed lit when it shouldn't have, the flag that was missing, the power-up that came too often. Keep them coming. The arguments at the table are still the whole point.
3 languages · a surprise Lightning Round · picture questions · a redesigned finish · 16 release candidates of testing