Gaffer

Gaffer is a football management game designed for a phone and a spare five minutes. You take charge of one fictional club for a single season, pick your squad, set the tactics and work through matchdays in short sessions rather than marathon sittings. The interface is built mobile-first: the squad list, next fixture and tactical setup are all reachable with a thumb, and the whole game runs in a browser tab with no download or account.

It is also one of the most unusual build stories on the site. Gaffer is produced by a “lights-off” software delivery pipeline: an unattended Claude Code factory, governed by nWave, builds the game one story at a time from scheduled GitHub Actions runs. The owner checks in roughly once a week, from a phone. Planning runs write the stories and technical decisions, reviewer agents critique them, and a story only counts as done when its protected black-box scenarios pass on main. Merge gates cover lint, types, tests, locked paths, append-only rules, test counts, diff size, story regression, a phone-viewport smoke test and an AI reviewer that can block a change. There is even a kill switch controlled by an issue label or a config flag.

That process matters to players because it explains the game’s shape: small, testable features that arrive steadily rather than one giant launch. The test suite is part of the product, not an afterthought, and the mobile viewport is checked on every merge. For anyone curious about autonomous software delivery, the repository is as interesting as the game — the roadmap and architecture decisions are committed alongside the code, and the factory is explicitly designed not to read issue or pull-request text for instructions.

Gaffer will not replace a full football manager sim, and it does not pretend to. What it offers is a focused, fast season with a clear loop and a phone-first interface — the kind of game you can open on a commute, make one decision, and close again. It is free, it runs in the browser, and it is a genuinely useful case study in what happens when an AI coding pipeline is given guard rails, a roadmap and a weekly human check-in instead of a single prompt. If you like football tactics, management games or autonomous build experiments, put it on your list.