LastNameLegacy.com

Overview

LastNameLegacy is a small game with a deliberately narrow rule: I show you a famous surname, you give me the first name. You’re scored on how close you got, with a per-game breakdown that makes the score transparent instead of magic.

The game ships in two modes, historical (deceased people) and living, each backed by its own curated database of unambiguous names with country, profession, and era metadata.

What it does

• Two game modes. Historical and living people, switchable per round. Each mode draws from its own curated surnames table.
• LLM-graded answers. Strict string matching is the wrong UX for a trivia game (“Einstein” should match “Albert Einstein”). The scorer runs each answer through an LLM to grade for intent and proximity to the canonical name, not exact spelling.
• Score breakdown. Every result shows why you got the score you did, so a low score never feels arbitrary.
• Profiles. Display name, total games played, total score.
• Leaderboards and rankings so the score actually means something socially.

Stack

• Next.js 16 + React 19 for the front-end and server actions. TypeScript end to end. Tailwind for styling.
• Supabase for Postgres, auth, and row-level security. Schema includes surnames, living people, profiles, and a games table that stores every play with full score JSON for the breakdown view.
• OpenAI API for the answer-grading layer.
• Zod for runtime validation at every API boundary.
• Deployed on Vercel.

Design decisions

• Curate the data, don’t scrape it. Both surname tables are hand-picked for unambiguity. There’s exactly one famous “Einstein,” but plenty of ambiguous surnames that would make the game frustrating if drawn at random.
• Fuzzy scoring is the point, not a workaround. The LLM in the scoring path is what turns this from “type the exact string” into a game that rewards knowing the person.
• RLS instead of trust. Postgres row-level-security policies are the actual permission model: profiles and games are public reads, users can only insert their own. The Next.js server is just a client.