I Love Fragrances, So I Built a 6-Game Arcade + Concierge About My Obsession

Hi, my name's Ibrahim, I'm a university student, and I have a problem: I love fragrances way more than my bank account loves me for it. It started small, the way these things always do. A cheap Middle Eastern attar someone gave me as a gift, the kind that costs less than a coffee but somehow smells like it belongs in a much fancier bottle. Then another. Then I started actually reading about notes, pyramids, accords, sillage, the whole rabbit hole. Fast forward through a lot of saved-up allowance and skipped nights out, and I've now got about 20 bottles on my shelf. Mostly affordable Middle Eastern gems (some of them genuinely punch way above their price), with a small handful of designer pieces I saved up for and treat like trophies. If you're a fellow fragrance enthusiast, you already know the feeling: you don't just "wear" a scent, you collect them, you study them, you have opinions about whether a note is top, heart, or base and you will absolutely fight someone about it. That obsession is basically the entire reason this project exists. So when I saw the DEV Weekend Challenge's "Passion" prompt, there was only one thing I could possibly build. recommendmeafragrance is a browser arcade for fragrance nerds: six small daily games built around real perfume data (notes, brands, years, price tiers), plus an AI Concierge you can actually talk to about what you're in the mood for. Every game feeds into a personal "shelf" that tracks which fragrances you've discovered, plus streaks so you have a reason to come back tomorrow. Here's the tour. A new fragrance is picked every day (the same one for everyone, worldwide, no matter your timezone). You get 6 guesses, and after each one you get Wordle style feedback: was the brand exact or just the same house family, did the real answer come out earlier or later than your guess, is it pricier or cheaper, same gender, same concentration, how many notes do you actually share. You can even copy a little emoji share-grid at the end, because obviously. There's now an Easy/Hard toggle: Easy leans on a famous, recognizable bottle for the day; Hard pulls from the deep catalog for people who want a real challenge. This one's my favorite. You're given nothing but notes, revealed one at a time in rotating order (one top, one heart, one base, cycling through the pyramid), and you have to guess the perfume before your score hits zero. Every note you reveal costs points, but the cost is calculated as a percentage of that specific perfume's total note count, so a fragrance with 6 notes and one with 16 notes both cost the same fair share to fully reveal. As you burn through reveals, letters of the name itself slowly uncover hangman-style, so there's a nice tension between "guess now" and "wait, I need one more hint." Also has an Easy/Hard mode, same famous-vs-deep-catalog split as Scentle. Pick as many top, heart, and base notes as you want from a searchable list of hundreds of real notes, hit "invent," and the app runs a weighted similarity match (base notes count extra, since they carry a scent's identity the most) against the whole catalog to tell you what you basically just invented, plus two runner-up matches. It also treats closely related notes as the same family (so picking "vanilla" still matches perfumes listed under "Madagascar vanilla," etc.), because with hundreds of real notes in the system, exact-string-only matching would've been brutal. Two perfumes, one question: which came out first, or which one's pricier? Keep guessing right to build a streak, one miss ends the run. Easy mode keeps the gap obvious and leans on famous bottles; Hard mode pulls from the deep catalog and can come down to a single year or price tier. Set some dials (season, occasion, how much chaos you want), pull the lever, get a fragrance recommendation that actually respects your filters instead of just being random. Swipe through fragrances blind, no brand or hype attached, just notes and vibe, and decide "buy" or "skip." At the end it tells you your "nose score," how many of your buys were actually the famous, universally-loved ones. Humbling, honestly. Alongside the games there's a chat-style AI Concierge, built to feel like the app's little mascot come to life: warm, encouraging, genuinely curious about what you like, not just a recommendation-spitting bot. Tell it "something warm and cozy for winter nights" and it'll actually ask a follow-up question before throwing fragrances at you, and when it does recommend something, it comes with a real, buyable card attached, not just a name typed in a chat bubble. This is where I'm submitting for the Best Use of Google AI category. The Concierge runs on a shared daily budget by default so everyone gets to try it for free, but I added a "bring your own Gemini API key" option: paste in a free key from Google AI Studio, and the Concierge switches over to running entirely on Gemini for you, with zero daily limit. The key never touches our servers, it lives only in your browser's local storage and gets sent along with your own requests, so you're fully in control of it. It felt like the right way to let people who want unlimited access get it, without me needing to foot an unlimited AI bill as a student running this on personal savings. None of this matters if it's just a trivia game, so every single fragrance in the catalog (over a thousand of them) is linked to a live, working offer through FragranceShop.com. Win a game, discover something in the Concierge, or just click "buy" on a card, and it adds to your personal shelf and takes you straight to a real product you can actually purchase. It's a small, honest way to make an app about a hobby self-sustaining without shoving ads in your face. 🔗 recommendmeafragrance.vercel.app No pressure to sign up for anything just to poke around, though creating a free account (Google sign-in, ten seconds) saves your streaks and shelf across devices and unlocks the Concierge chat. (screenshots to add before publishing: hub page, Note Detective mid-game, Concierge chat, Build-a-Bottle results) I've genuinely lost track of how many hours went into this between actual classwork, but every time I opened a new bottle from my (very modest, very Middle-Eastern-attar-heavy) collection for "research," it felt worth it. If you're even a little bit of a fragrance nerd, or you just like small, weird, well-made web games, I'd love for you to come play and tell me what your nose score is. weekendchallenge #googleai #webdev #showdev