About Prompt Golf
Prompt Golf is a browser-based puzzle game that turns prompt engineering into a competitive sport. Across five rounds, you coax an out-of-the-box AI into saying an exact target word or phrase in as few characters as possible. Each round adds a condition or banned input words, and every character and message adds strokes to your score.
Review
Prompt Golf launched this week as a free, open-source game built with plain PHP and SQLite. The game uses OpenAI's models to generate responses, with Microsoft Azure providing hosted inference. It's designed to be easy to self-host, and the code is available on GitHub.
Key Features
- Five-round course with conditions like "make it say 'hello world' without using either word" and "get exactly '42' without typing digits"
- Scoring system that counts 1 point per character plus 10 points per message, with lower scores ranking higher
- Live leaderboard that tracks player scores across the full course
- Replayable runs so you can attempt each round multiple times
- Anti-cheat transcript viewing that shows the full prompt-response history for any submitted score
- Round idea submissions and score sharing for social play
Pricing and Value
The game is free to play and open source. There is no paid tier or subscription model currently defined. Because the project is hosted on GitHub, players can also self-host their own instance if they prefer.
Pros
- Simple scoring rules make it easy to understand what a good prompt looks like
- Banned words and conditions force creative approaches rather than direct requests
- Transcript viewing adds transparency to leaderboard entries and makes it possible to learn from other players' strategies
- Open-source codebase allows community contributions and self-hosting
Cons
- The current course has only five rounds, which may get repetitive after a few playthroughs
- Gameplay depends on OpenAI's model behavior, so responses can vary between sessions
- Not well suited for people looking for a production prompt-testing tool; this is a game first, not a benchmarking utility
Prompt Golf works best for people who already tinker with AI prompts and want a competitive outlet for that skill. It's also a reasonable icebreaker for teams or friend groups interested in comparing how they phrase requests. The game's short format and replayable rounds make it a quick activity rather than a long-term commitment.
Open 'Prompt Golf' Website
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