About PartAI

How This Started

PartAI began as a weekend project in late 2024 when someone at game night said "what if we used AI to generate Pictionary images instead of drawing?" Two years later, we've got six game modes, thousands of players, and way more database optimization knowledge than we ever wanted.

The original plan was simple: make a browser game where AI does the creative heavy lifting so players can focus on the strategic and social parts. No downloads, no barriers to entry, just open a link and play.

Turns out making AI work reliably in a real-time multiplayer party game is significantly harder than we thought. But also way more interesting.

What We're Actually Building

PartAI isn't trying to replace traditional party games. We love Jackbox. We love board game nights. We're not your competition, we're your Tuesday night option when everyone's in different cities and you need something new.

The AI isn't here to be impressive—it's here to create moments. Weird prompts that generate cursed images everyone screenshots. That one round where the AI's fake answer was more believable than what your friend actually wrote. The story ending that made everyone pause and go "wait, that's actually good?"

We measure success by how often people tell us "we played for way longer than we planned" and "we won't shut up about the round where..."

The Tech We Use (And Why)

Next.js and Supabase handle the infrastructure because they work and we're a small team that doesn't have time to reinvent WebSockets. We rotate between several AI image generation models (DALL-E 3, Flux variants) depending on what lobbies need—quality vs speed tradeoffs are real.

For text generation modes we use OpenAI's models with heavily customized prompting to create believable fake answers in Human Verification and AI Deception modes. Getting the AI to "sound human" without being creepy took months of iteration.

Everything runs in the browser. No Unity runtime, no desktop app, no 2GB download. We're committed to being maximally accessible—if you have modern web browser and halfway decent internet, you can play.

Our Design Principles

• Fast over perfect. We'd rather generate a slightly wonky image in 5 seconds than a perfect one in 30. Party game energy dies during long waits.
• Chaos within guardrails. Let players be creative and weird, but have systems that prevent one person from ruining everyone else's fun.
• Transparent about AI limitations. We don't pretend the AI is perfect. When it generates something cursed, that's part of the game, not a bug we're hiding.
• Real-time or bust. If a feature requires page refreshes or breaks the live multiplayer flow, we rethink it. Momentum matters.
• Browser-first forever. We'll never require an account for basic play. Guest mode exists because sometimes you just want to play a game without signing up for another damn service.

Who Actually Plays This?

Initially we thought we'd get competitive gaming crowds. We do, but we also get:

• Remote work teams using it for Friday team building
• Long-distance friend groups who play weekly together
• Language learners practicing casual English
• Creative writing communities workshopping stories
• Teachers using Fake News mode to teach media literacy
• That one circus performer who uses it to convince people they're AI because their life is too weird to be believable

We love when people use PartAI for purposes we never anticipated. Games are better when players make them their own.

Get In Touch

Questions? Weird bug reports? Want to tell us about that one round that made everyone lose it? We're genuinely interested.