Jeopardy!

About two weeks ago, some visitors of the openSUSE Conference enjoyed playing openSUSE Jeopardy.

You might guess that there are some free implementations of the Jeopardy game out there. This is true, but everything I found didn't match my requirements (with varying reasons for each implementation I found). Therefore I decided to improve Ryan McDevitt's JavaScript Jeopardy and added quite some features I wanted to have available for running the openSUSE Jeopardy.

Some technical details:

• the board is implemented using HTML and jQuery, so all you need is a browser (ideally in fullscreen mode)
• the answers and questions are read from JSON files (you can also mark answers as "daily doubles" there)
• everything (except selecting a tile) is done with keyboard shortcuts
• besides the obvious basic features, there are some just for fun additions like the demo runner

I'm happy to announce that I just released my Jeopardy implementation on github under the MIT licence. (Yes, I usually prefer GPL, but since both jQuery and Ryan's original implementation are MIT-licensed, I decided to keep it that way.)

If you want to run a Jeopardy show (with whatever topics) yourself, I hope you find my implementation useful!

I'd also like to thank Hakon from the Linux User Group Landau for soldering a Jeopardy controller using the controller of an old USB keyboard. If you want to do something like that yourself: Dismantle an old keyboard. You'll find a small controller board which is attached to two foils that reach out to the keys. The buzzing is done using the 1..9 keys, so find out which contacts are used for those keys and solder cables on them. Oh, and make sure the cables are long enough to reach out to your players ;-)