A while back, I stumbled upon Roger Price's Droodles, a collection of absurdist doodles with bizarre and amusing captions. Droodles encourage you to guess the meaning behind a minimalist drawing before revealing the absurd explanation. In the book's own words:

So I made a little game out of it. The idea is simple: you're shown a grid of droodles on the left and a set of captions on the right. Your goal is to match each drawing with its correct caption. The game ends when you’ve got them all matched or give up trying. It's meant to be light, quick, and silly, just like the original droodles themselves.

I built the game in an afternoon while sitting at a café near my university in Bogotá, Colombia (actually, this blog post is being written at that same café). To collect the droodles, I wrote an OpenCV script that scans each page of the book, identifies rectangles matching the size of the drawings, and uses OCR to extract the captions just below. Once I had the images and text, I implemented the game logic: pick a random set of droodles, shuffle their captions, and display them in two separate grids. The objective is to match all of them with as few mistakes as possible. The game also includes a difficulty setting that controls the size of the grid. More droodles for more chaos.

Other than that, it’s pretty minimal, just a weird little challenge to pass the time. You can try the game at droodles.vercel.app. Hope you have as much fun playing it as I did making it! If you’re curious about how it works, the code is available here.

Also, fun fact: Roger Price, the creator of Droodles, is also the co-creator of Mad Libs, another brilliantly goofy series of books built around randomness, absurdity, and laughter. If you liked one, you’ll probably enjoy the other.