Mandarena

A Mandarin Chinese learning game: a Bingo / Gomoku board of Chinese words where players speak a word to claim its square. First to five in a row wins.

Acknowledgement

This project is a fork of yanranchu-rgb/mandarena, originally created by @yanranchu-rgb. All original game design, artwork, sounds, and the initial implementation are their work. The upstream repository's commit history is preserved here. This fork adds the features listed below.

The original repository remains linked as the upstream git remote.

Play

• Live: https://mandarena-yanranchu.fly.dev
• Local (same device): open /game
• Online (two devices): open /online, create a room, share the code

Speech recognition works best in Google Chrome with a microphone.

What this fork adds

• Online PvP with rooms — create a 4-letter room code, a friend joins from another device, and the server keeps both boards in sync (Flask-SocketIO).
• 10,969-word leveled word bank (HSK 3.0) with a "use random" picker:
  • Level 1 — HSK 1–2 (beginner)
  • Level 2 — HSK 3–4 (elementary)
  • Level 3 — HSK 5–6 (intermediate)
  • Level 4 — HSK 7–9 (advanced)
• Custom vocabulary — paste any word list; the board auto-sizes (3×3 to 10×10).
• Better single-syllable recognition — interim results plus toneless-pinyin matching, so homophones (是/事, 四/寺 …) count and short words don't need dragging.

Run locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py            # http://localhost:8080

Tech

Flask · Flask-SocketIO · vanilla JS · Web Speech API · deployed on Fly.io.

Credits & data

• Original game: @yanranchu-rgb
• HSK vocabulary: drkameleon/complete-hsk-vocabulary
• Pinyin data: mozillazg/pinyin-data