I found Vivian Rose’s little web game “List Animals Until Failure” through a Hacker News thread (HN discussion) and immediately got hooked.

Then I typed my first few animals… and realized my English animal vocabulary is not exactly perfect. So I did the only sensible thing and made a German version.

Screenshot of the German Animalist game interface

The UI text is mostly translated with AI help (as all the other code). The part that actually took time was getting the animal names.

What the game is

It’s simple: you type animal names until you fail. If you repeat something, or you try to sneak in a too-broad term after a more specific one (and vice versa), the game calls you out.

The magic is that it feels instant because when you load the app you also load the complete animal list.

Where the animal list comes from

Vivian explains the original approach in her write-up (blog post): the game is powered by Wikidata + Wikipedia, and it ships a big offline lookup table so gameplay needs no network calls.

At a high level, the original project:

  • mines Wikidata entities representing taxons and builds a parent/child tree
  • uses Wikipedia article titles + redirects (and some extra heuristics like disambiguation pages) to decide what inputs should count as “the same animal term”
  • has a bunch of hand-tuning for edge cases

For the German version, I took a pragmatic route:

  • keep the same Q-IDs and taxonomy structure from the original dataset
  • fetch German names for those Q-IDs from Wikidata in batches
  • write out the German lookup tables that the game uses at runtime

I ended up with a few small Python helpers: one to fetch the German names from Wikidata, one to re-try missing entries, and one to add common singular forms (so “hai” works even if the canonical title is “haie”).

Credits

This exists because Vivian Rose built something genuinely fun and also wrote about it:

And here’s my German adaptation again: