A planning document that sat in a drawer for thirteen years — I finished it with AI

In 2013, I designed a quiz game.

Not just another buzzer-style trivia game. What I had in mind was something more awkward:What if answering a question correctly didn't earn you points, but let you "own" that question? A card, printed with a unique serial number, with only so many in existence worldwide. Answer correctly and it's yours. Anyone who wants it has to take it from you.

I sketched the entire rule set by hand — rarity, serial numbers, deck-building, battles, card-stealing.

Why now

I've done plenty of projects in between. There's one I still bring up to this day — Nezha. With that project I wasn't selling a game; I was selling "play and be blessed." No one remembers the specs, but the feeling stuck. The later "Taiwan Number One" was the same idea: letting players say hello to their moms from in front of the TV.

I never forgot that planning document in the drawer, because what it was trying to say was the same thing —The knowledge of this place is fought over by the people of this place.

In 2025, I started writing code with AI. Not to have it come up with ideas — the idea had been there for thirteen years. It was to have it help me actually finish what I'd dreamed up thirteen years ago.

Question bank, Flutter client, Firebase login, server-authoritative scoring, Glicko ranking, anti-cheating, seasons, auctions — piece by piece, filled in.

Now it's playable.

So what is it

Ask a Question AQ. In one sentence: the questions you answer correctly become your limited-edition collectible cards — and others can steal them from you.

• Every question is a serial-numbered card. Rare cards are limited server-wide — say, 1,000 copies. Once they're gone, they're gone for good, and only grow scarcer. The one in your hand is #0077, the only one in the world.
• Your collection is your arsenal. Battles are "bring your deck and quiz each other": you pick 7 cards to build a deck, and your opponent has to answer your cards. The fewer people who own a card, and the fewer who've seen its answer, the harder it is to crack —obscure knowledge becomes a weapon for the first time.
• Lose and you truly lose something. In PvP, the loser's cards — serial numbers and all — get taken by the winner. When others answer wrong they just lose points; when you answer wrong, the card becomes someone else's.
• A question bank made for Taiwan. 1,460 questions across 30 categories: the six special municipalities, Taiwanese street food, Taiwanese baseball, Stephen Chow, film and TV memes, the Analects and classical Chinese… not a translated question bank, but the common knowledge of this land.

The design intent I wrote on those handwritten pages thirteen years ago has now become a tagline:

Knowledge — it's faster to just take it.

Something I only understood after I finished

Throughout building this game, I kept asking myself: what is it actually selling?

Not "I'm good at answering questions." The thrill of a quiz game was never "I'm so smart," it's "I beat that person."

The real design is hidden in the moment you lose. When someone's epic card, painstakingly collected over three weeks, flies into their opponent's bookshelf because they got one God of Cookery question wrong — in that moment they realize something:

Knowledge in your head is storage; knowledge on the table is existence.

Do you really think the things you know are yours? Can you hold on to them?

This isn't a "work hard and you'll succeed" story. It's a story about knowledge sovereignty:Whether you know something isn't up to you to say. It's whether you dare to come to the table.

Play it now

No download — play right in your browser, no sign-up, answer three questions first, and you're guaranteed your first card at the end:

▶ satsumacreative.tw/aq

The me of thirteen years ago probably never imagined finishing it this way.

Currently in wipe-on-release closed beta.