Skelly Hunt

Open-source, Cloudflare-native NFC scavenger hunt platform — physical checkpoints, a live leaderboard, and $0/month infrastructure at event scale.

Live Demo ›

Overview

Skelly Hunt is a personal project — an NFC scavenger hunt platform I built for Denton’s annual Halloween event — physical checkpoints, a live leaderboard, and infrastructure that costs nothing to run at event scale.

Participants tap an NFC card (or scan a QR code) at locations around town — no app install. ESP32 terminals at physical checkpoints read the cards and show real-time feedback; everything else — the API, the admin dashboard, the leaderboard — runs on Cloudflare’s free tier, with Datadog RUM and OpenTelemetry wired in for observability across the browser, API, and firmware.

It’s fully open-source and still actively developed as the event’s flagship platform each October.

Features

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ESP32 checkpoint terminals

Hardware that reads physical NFC cards, shows real-time feedback, and configures itself remotely over Wi-Fi — no reflashing firmware between events.

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Live leaderboard

A public scoreboard with pixel-art avatars, updating in real time as participants check in via NFC tap or QR scan.

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$0/month infrastructure

Cloudflare Workers, Pages, D1, and R2, all on free tier at 500–1,000 participant scale.

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Privacy-first by design

PII encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, a 30-day account-deletion grace period, and a leaderboard that only ever shows usernames and avatars.

What I Learned

Remote config beats reflashing

Location tokens, device secrets, and display themes push to checkpoint terminals over Wi-Fi — swapping a device's role never means walking it back to a laptop.

Config-as-source-of-truth prevents drift

Cloudflare bindings, cron triggers, and R2 buckets all live in one wrangler.toml — a fresh clone can stand the whole Worker up by reading config alone, no tribal knowledge required.

Command Palette