Tripletta

Context

Tripletta is a web game published on GazzaPlay, the games hub of La Gazzetta dello Sport. Players start from a footballer and build a chain of connections to reach a set of objectives, across several difficulty levels.

Concept, rules and UI/UX were defined by the WeLudo design team and approved by La Gazzetta dello Sport. I ran the feasibility review and the entire technical build: frontend, backend, data pipeline, infrastructure and integration into Gazzetta's editorial ecosystem.

From a game requirement to a configurable engine

The backend was not designed around football alone. I separated datasets, templates, predicates, validation rules and puzzle generation into an engine that can serve other knowledge domains. Football is the first concrete implementation: players, clubs, competitions and countries form a graph of entities and relations on which the system generates and verifies chains.

That decision made every phase more demanding. Seemingly specific functions — from search to objective computation — had to stay configuration-driven and carry no assumptions about the football dataset.

Turning game design into repeatable rules

The hardest part was translating concepts such as popularity and difficulty into deterministic rules. After experimenting with pageviews, Google Trends and other signals, I settled on sitelink count as the popularity indicator: a simpler compromise that proved more reliable in testing.

Generation always starts from a sufficiently well-known node, simulates graph exploration, and applies different thresholds to intermediate and final nodes depending on difficulty. The available predicates change per level too. Finally the system filters missions by their number of possible solutions, avoiding both trivially broad targets and impossibly narrow ones.

Data, user experience and integration

An ETL pipeline imports and normalises heterogeneous football sources, reconciles identities and aliases, handles time-bound relations and materialises the indexes the game uses. Retries, incremental processing and quality checks keep the dataset usable without depending on external sources during a match.

The Next.js frontend handles reactive search, move validation, progress persistence, drag-and-drop, results and sharing. To coexist with the host's header, footer, advertising and brand identity, the app isolates its own styles through Shadow DOM and integrates the components provided by Gazzetta.

Outcome

Tripletta has been live on GazzaPlay since May 2026 and runs in the hub alongside Gazzetta's other games.

Usage figures belong to the client and I cannot publish them. What I can show here is the system — a configurable engine, a data pipeline and an editorial integration holding up in production — not the metric.

Concept, rules and UI/UX: WeLudo design team, approved by La Gazzetta dello Sport. Visuals taken from the project's Figma mockups; on-screen content is illustrative.