v1.6.0 — The House Plays Along
Until now the game lived on two screens: the TV and the phones in everyone's hands. The room itself just sat there. This release changes that. When the answer comes in, the lamps react. When someone hits a streak, the speaker in the corner says so. In the last seconds of a question the light breathes faster, and when a winner is decided the house can drop into a scene you built yourself.
It also went the other way. A party quiz is only fun if everyone in the room can actually play it, so this release quietly fixed a handful of things that were shutting people out — a reveal a colour-blind guest couldn't read, text too small for the far end of the sofa, a question timer too fast for a seven-year-old, and a menu that was always in the host's language whether you spoke it or not.
Six release candidates went into this one. Pull up a chair.
🏠 The house plays along
Off by default — nothing changes until you switch it on, and then only as far as you take it.
Underneath sits a new event backbone: Quizify now fires quizify_* events on the Home Assistant bus at every milestone of a game — question shown, answer revealed, streak hit, winner decided. If you already build automations, that alone is the feature; wire the events to whatever you like.
On top of it come three layers you don't have to build yourself. Light choreography turns your party lights into a game-show rig, with transient accents on the game's beats and a countdown pulse that quickens in the final seconds. Room sound effects put the cues on a real speaker — correct, wrong, streak, winner — and four of them now ship with the integration, so the feature makes a sound out of the box instead of waiting for you to go hunting for audio files. A finale scene selector hands the moment of victory to a scene.* you built.
All of it is set up from a panel of its own in the host screen: three one-tap presets — Game Show, Cozy Glow, Events only — and an advanced section underneath if you want per-effect control and your own entity picks.
🎙️ Hands free
Five new Home Assistant services — start_game, next_round, pause, resume, end_game — mean the host no longer has to be the person holding the tablet. Drive the game from Assist ("Hey Nabu, next question"), a Zigbee remote on the coffee table, a dashboard button, or an automation. Calls that arrive at the wrong moment fail with a clear message rather than doing something strange.
🔀 Questions that stay fresh
Play two game nights in a row and the second one used to feel familiar. Question selection now weighs against what you've recently seen — a decay curve plus a hard exclusion window, with a guard so small packs don't run dry. On by default; switch Avoid recent repeats off and the old ordering comes back exactly as it was.
♿ Room for everyone
The reveal no longer depends on colour. Right and wrong used to differ only in hue, and at Soft Parlor's soft saturations the sage and the dusty red collapse into nearly the same grey-green under red-green colour blindness — a guest could not read their own result on their own phone. The answer buttons now carry the same ★ and × the TV has always used. This one isn't a setting: a guest on a borrowed phone never finds a settings switch.
Next to the speaker icon there's now an accessibility toggle — larger text, motion held still — remembered per phone. Handy for the far end of the sofa, and for anyone whose device never had "reduce motion" switched on in the first place.
Each phone can also pick its own language now, from flag chips on the join screen. The questions stay in the pack language the host chose; the buttons and labels around them follow the player. A Spanish-speaking guest at a German host's party gets a Spanish interface without anyone changing the game.
And for the youngest players: the timer picker now goes up to 180 seconds, with a "With kids" preset (5 rounds, easy, 180 s) so you don't have to go hunting for it. That came from a host who told us three rounds in that their children simply could not read a question and four answers in 45 seconds.
🔧 Under the hood
The host's narration dropdowns — TTS engine and speaker — used to come up empty; they now arrive over the already-authenticated admin channel instead of racing a token, so they populate reliably. Screen readers stopped reading translation keys aloud. The test suite is at 1,084 tests. And the repository finally carries the MIT licence its README has advertised since launch, plus the HACS and Home Assistant validation that Quizify had been shipping without.
🙏 Thank you
The best change in this release came from an external report — someone playing with small children who told us the clock was too fast. That is worth more than a feature request list. Keep them coming.
Whole-home game-show mode · HA services for voice + automations · freshness engine · colour-independent reveal · per-player language · 1,084 passing tests