GazzaQuiz & QuestoQuello

Context

GazzaQuiz and QuestoQuello are web games published inside the digital ecosystem of La Gazzetta dello Sport. They share content, identity, leaderboards and editorial tooling, but play differently: in the first, players order a set of cards along a metric; in the second, they pick quickly between two alternatives, building streaks and multipliers.

I owned the entire technical build of both products: frontend, shared backend, architecture, back office, infrastructure, publishing and maintenance. Concept, game design and UI/UX came from the WeLudo designer, while dedicated editorial contributors prepared the content.

Restarting from the gameplay, not the legacy code

GazzaQuiz reused almost the same gameplay archetype as LineTime, WeLudo's earlier mobile trivia game. Reusing that code directly would have dragged in a by-then legacy base, built around the many features of a commercial Unity app and only marginally relevant to an editorial web experience.

So I rebuilt the game from scratch in Angular and TypeScript. The rewrite let me adapt the ordering interaction to browser, touch and desktop — and, more importantly, rethink the content model: cards, metrics, decks, tags and calendars were generalised to support different modes, not just the first game.

A core designed for more than one game

The Node.js, Express and MongoDB backend was designed from the start as an extensible platform. A shared core handles authentication, guest users, matches, persistence, localised content, the editorial calendar, statistics, percentiles, ranking and leaderboards. Game-specific rules are delegated to interchangeable engines behind a shared contract.

That separation made it possible to add QuestoQuello later without retrofitting generalisation across the whole system. The new engine reused the platform's APIs, data and operations, adding its own loop, scoring and difficulty curve.

Answer correctness, timeouts and results are validated server-side, so leaderboards and statistics do not depend solely on browser state — while still giving immediate in-game feedback.

Two experiences on the same base

In GazzaQuiz, a new ordering challenge appears every day: players drag cards along a temporal or quantitative line, confirm the arrangement and get feedback on correct positions. Calendar, periodic leaderboards, percentile and sharing turn a single puzzle into a recurring appointment.

In QuestoQuello, each step shows two cards and asks which satisfies a greater/lesser relation. Timer, lives, streaks, combos and multipliers build continuous progression; difficulty varies through configurable rules on value distance, exclusions and selection probability. The frontend uses NgRx to make loading, timers, feedback, prefetch and game-over explicit. Both interfaces adapt to mobile and desktop and generate shareable result images in the browser.

Making editorial work operable

A protected back office turns spreadsheets into content, configuration and scheduled publications. Imports build or update metrics, cards, decks, images, setups and schedules, letting the team prepare new challenges without touching the game loop.

Dedicated contributors produced the editorial material; I handled validation and the final technical review before publication. That step connected editorial work to a data model strict enough to drive gameplay and leaderboards in production.

Outcome

Both games were integrated with Gazzetta's identity, advertising, analytics and editorial components. Users could play as guests and sign in to keep results and enter leaderboards, with progression unified across the two identities.

Together, GazzaQuiz and QuestoQuello passed 5 million games started (figure read from the production systems, September 2026). Both are still available in the GazzaPlay hub. Beyond the volume, the more important result is a technical base that sustained two genuinely different products over time without duplicating infrastructure and operations.

Concept, game design and UI/UX: WeLudo designer. Content: dedicated editorial contributors.