This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam
Beat the Oracle is a daily FIFA World Cup 2026 prediction game where you go head-to-head against an AI — Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash — to call match scores before kickoff. Out-predict the machine and you win the day's Turing Test. Lose, and the Oracle has outsmarted you... until tomorrow.
Every day you're served the same 5 matches as everyone else: some already played (scored instantly), some upcoming (lock in your call and come back). The Oracle reads each team's recent World Cup form and makes its own prediction with written reasoning — which you only see after you've locked in yours. No peeking, no cheating. Just you versus the machine.
Scoring:
| Result | Points | |
|---|---|---|
| Exact scoreline | 3 | |
| 🎯 "Enigma Cracked!" | ||
| Correct result (W/D/L) | 1 | |
| ✅ | ||
| Miss | 0 | |
| ❌ |
This jam asked for a game inspired by the solstice or any June celebration — and Beat the Oracle is stitched to June on two threads the challenge itself calls out:
And the "daily" loop — new matches each day, your score reset, the machines winning "for today" — leans into the solstice's own theme of cycles and the passage of time. Every day is a fresh test. Every match is a new cipher.
🔗 Live demo: hema-nambi.github.io/BeatTheOracle
Can you out-predict Gemini AI at the FIFA World Cup 2026?
A daily prediction duel where you go head-to-head against an AI Oracle — powered by Google Gemini 1.5 Flash — to predict FIFA World Cup 2026 match scores. Beat the Oracle and you win the Turing Test. Lose, and the machines have won... for today.
Every day you get 5 matches — a mix of recently played games (score immediately) and upcoming fixtures (save your prediction and come back after kickoff).
The Oracle analyses real World Cup form data and makes its own prediction. You only see its reasoning after you've locked in yours.
| Points | Condition |
|---|---|
| 🎯 3 pts | Exact scoreline match — "Enigma Cracked!" |
| ✅ 1 pt | Correct result (win / draw / loss) |
| ❌ 0 pts | Miss |
Beat the Oracle's total → 🏆 Human wins…
site.api.espn.com/apis/site/v2/sports/soccer/fifa.world/scoreboard
)The whole thing is one file you can open in a browser. That constraint kept the game honest and the architecture transparent — exactly what you want when the judges might read the source.
This is the heart of the game. The Oracle isn't a random number generator wearing a robot emoji — it reasons from real tournament data. I pull each team's live W/L/D form from ESPN and hand Gemini a structured prompt:
You are the Oracle — an AI sports analyst at the FIFA World Cup 2026.
Recent form:
• Canada: W W D
• Morocco: W L W
Predict the exact final score. Respond with JSON: {"home": N, "away": N, "reason": "..."}
Gemini returns a specific scoreline and a sentence of reasoning you get to read and judge. Sometimes it's frighteningly sharp. Sometimes you school it. That tension — is the machine actually smarter than me here? — is the entire game. Without Gemini, this is just a form. With it, you have an opponent.
Everyone gets the same 5 matches each day, chosen by a date-seeded PRNG (xorshift32 seeded on the current date). That does three things:
🔮 Beat the Oracle ⚽ — Day #5
FIFA World Cup 2026 🇨🇦
🎯 🇨🇦🇲🇦 You: 2–1 · Oracle: 1–0 🔐 Enigma Cracked!
✅ 🇧🇷🇪🇸 You: 2–1 · Oracle: 2–0
👤 Me: 7pts vs 🔮 Oracle: 4pts
🏆 Human wins the Turing Test!
#BeatTheOracle #WorldCup2026 #JuneSolsticeGameJam
Wordle-style emoji grid, one-click copy, built-in share button. Designed to travel.
football-data.org
) blocks browser requests. I swapped the whole pipeline to ESPN's public API — free, fast, and CORS-open.I'm submitting to both additional categories — and in this game they're the same mechanic seen from two angles.
The entire game is a Turing Test you run yourself, daily. Turing's Imitation Game asked whether you could tell human from machine; Beat the Oracle asks whether human intuition can still out-predict one. The scoring language, the intro screen, and the win states all frame the duel through his legacy:
Every match is a new cipher. Every session is a new test. It's not a tribute added to the game — it's the game's spine.
Gemini 1.5 Flash isn't a feature here — it's the opponent. It:
The AI is the difference between "a football prediction form" and "a game with a worthy rival." Google AI Studio's free tier made it possible to ship that rival to anyone with a 30-second API key signup.
You'll need a free Gemini API key from Google AI Studio — takes about 30 seconds. Then go find out whether the machines have won... today.
Made with ❤️ in Canada 🇨🇦 for the June Solstice Game Jam 2026.