Golfle case study

The challenge

What needed to change.

Other major sports already had a Wordle moment — Poeltl for the NBA, Weddle for the NFL — and golf fans didn't have one. The opening was obvious; the work was building it as a real daily product instead of a one-week novelty.

The approach

Take the Poeltl / Weddle pattern that golf fans already understood from other sports, translate it for how people actually compare golfers (height, country, tour, age, wins, college, OWGR), and back it with a live data pipeline so the player pool stays current week to week.

What shipped

Deliverables.

Custom Next.js + Supabase web game
Live OWGR + ESPN data sync for active players
Daily, Current Pros, and All-Time Greats game modes
Global and friends-only leaderboards
Stats, streaks, achievements, and PNG share cards
Cross-device account sync and SEO/AI-search setup

Proof points

Live at golfledaily.com with a new puzzle every day at midnight Eastern
PGA Tour, DP World Tour, and LIV Golf League players covered
Top 250 OWGR refreshed weekly from official source data
All-Time Greats mode includes legends like Nicklaus, Palmer, and Woods

More detail

What the work included.

The quick proof points matter, but this is where the work starts to feel useful for a buyer: less manual work, clearer marketing direction, and systems that make the business easier to run.

How it started

Wordle for the other sports — but not for golf

Poeltl had become a daily ritual for NBA fans and Weddle had done the same for the NFL. Other leagues were getting their own versions too. Golf, somehow, didn't have one. The idea wasn't to invent a format — it was to build the version that should already exist.

PoeltlNBA — daily player guess

Inspiration

WeddleNFL — same format

Inspiration

GolfleNow the golf version

What we built

Format fans recognize

Built on a pattern golf fans already knew

Anyone who had played Poeltl or Weddle would understand Golfle in five seconds: type a player, read the colored row, narrow it down across eight guesses. The format wasn't the work — the golf-native execution was.

Translated for golf

Comparison categories that actually matter

We mapped the Poeltl pattern onto the data points golf fans actually use to think about players: height, country, tour, age, career wins, college, and OWGR. Each guess returns colored cells with directional arrows.

Built as a product

Daily ritual, not a novelty week

Stats, streaks, achievements, leaderboards, share cards, and cross-device sync turn a one-week novelty into a daily ritual. The same things that made Poeltl and Weddle stick.

Live data

Real golf data, refreshed weekly

Static lists go stale fast. The Golfle backend pulls from official sources so rankings and rosters reflect the actual tour, not a snapshot from launch day.

250+active players covered

OWGR top tier

Weeklyrefresh cadence

Auto-sync from ESPN + OWGR

PGA / DPW / LIVtour coverage

All three majors-eligible tours

Auto-sync

OWGR pipeline

A scheduled Vercel cron pulls the Official World Golf Ranking from ESPN every Tuesday and updates the player database, including rookies who broke into the top 250.

LIV included

LIV Golf League data

LIV players keep their rankings tracked separately so the daily puzzle reflects the full majors-eligible field, not just PGA Tour starters.

Roster maintained

Active roster pruning

Players who never made the top 250 and never won a pro event are deactivated, keeping the daily approachable while the unlimited All-Time Greats mode still includes the historical greats.

Engineering

Built to feel like a real product

Beyond the game, the work covers the parts that make a daily web game stick: cross-device sync, durable accounts, a leaderboard people trust, and the SEO setup needed to actually be found.

Phone ↔ laptopshared progress

Cross-device cloud sync

Google + emailsign-in options

Supabase Auth

Friendsleaderboard filter

Follow-based comparison

Same account, any device

Cross-device sync

Signed-in players see the same daily progress, stats, and streaks whether they open the game on their phone or their laptop. State syncs through the server with optimistic concurrency, not just localStorage.

Leaderboards

Global and friends-only views

Daily and all-time leaderboards rank players by speed-to-solve. A friends filter lets you scope it to people you actually know.

Discoverable

SEO + AI search setup

Sitemap, robots, OG tags, structured data (WebApplication + FAQPage), and an llms.txt file mean the game shows up in Google rich results and AI Overviews — not just on someone's phone screen.

Artifacts

What the work looks like.

Golfle daily game board mid-round with a Scottie Scheffler guess — The board mid-round. Each guess returns a row comparing height, country, tour, age, wins, college, and OWGR with directional arrows for numeric stats.

Golfle game mode selector open showing Daily, Current Pros, and All-Time Greats — Three modes give different audiences something to play: a daily for the casual fan, Current Pros for unlimited rounds against the active tour, and All-Time Greats for the historians.

Golfle board with two guesses, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy — Multiple guesses stack the comparison. You can see country, tour, and college shift between players as the puzzle narrows.

Single guess row close-up showing Scottie Scheffler with colored comparison cells — The comparison row is the heart of the game. Yellow means close, green means exact, and arrows point you toward the right answer for numeric stats.

Golfle empty board ready for a new daily puzzle — A fresh daily resets at midnight Eastern. Same mystery golfer worldwide, same eight chances.