La Quiniela

A World Cup 2026 prediction pool for a handful of friends — quiniela.emilio2601.dev.

Call every match home, draw or away. After a match finishes, your points for a correct call are the number of people you beat — so backing the upset nobody else saw is worth far more than taking the favourite the whole room took.

How it works

• Join by name — no password, honour system. Six friends, one shared pool.
• Pick every fixture as home / draw / away on the picks board. Change your mind freely…
• …until kickoff, when the pick locks. That's the one hard rule, and it keeps the scoring denominator well-defined.
• Score: for each finished match, a correct pick earns (people who picked it) − (people who got it right) — the number of players you beat. The standings are computed on read; there's no leaderboard table.

The scoring formula lives in one place (Leaderboard.points_for_correct) so it's a one-line change to switch to a "guarantee at least 1 point for any correct pick" variant.

Stack

Server-rendered Rails 8 with Hotwire (Turbo + a little Stimulus) — no API, no separate frontend. PostgreSQL, Solid Queue / Cache / Cable (no Redis), Propshaft, Puma, deployed as a Docker image on Dokku.

Data

• Fixtures are seeded once from openfootball/worldcup.json (public domain) — all 104 matches, numbered in official FIFA chronological order.
• Results are pulled by a recurring job from football-data.org, which writes finished scores and resolves knockout teams as the bracket fills in.

Local development

Requires Ruby (see .ruby-version) and PostgreSQL.

bin/setup            # install gems, prepare the database
bin/rails db:seed    # load the World Cup 2026 fixtures
bin/rails server     # http://localhost:3000
bin/rails test       # run the suite

To pull live results locally you need a free football-data.org API token in credentials (football_data_api_token); without it the poller simply skips.

Notes

• Match numbers are the official FIFA chronological numbers (Match 1 is the opener, Match 28 is Mexico v Korea), derived by ranking openfootball's group-ordered fixtures by kickoff.
• The production host is IPv6-only and football-data.org is IPv4-only, so results are fetched through a small Cloudflare Worker proxy (cloudflare/fd-proxy/).
• /admin is an internal, unlinked engagement + ops dashboard.