Try out our free online game on Facebook!
Play with all your friends and compete to see who knows them best!
GiftTRAP wins GAMES Magazine’s “Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008”
Click here to find out how we’ve turned gift giving into a hilarious social experience
Click to unwrap the fun.
GiftTRAP is the hilarious new game that’s taking the gaming world by storm and putting the social back into board games.
The goal is to really get to know your friends and family.
You win by knowing your friends and choosing the right gifts, but most of all it’s just fun to play and gets you talking about things that matter.

Love to play Trivial Pursuit, Cranium or Apples to Apples - You will love this family party game.
GiftTRAP is all the fun of Secret Santa without needing to shop or wrap.
GiftTRAP Live is all down to Ruby on Rails.
When I decided I wanted to develop the online version of GiftTRAP we had some big decisions to make. We needed to pick a platform. I’d been a big fan or Expression Engine (and I still am - it’s used for the rest of the GiftTRAP site), but when it came to controlling workflow and sending emails it seemed very hard to get Expression Engine to do just what we wanted. We needed more of a web-based development platform.
Well after some exploration and some fact checking it seemed Ruby on Rails would be a great choice.
We tested it out and as per the marketing we had a simple version running in 3 days. Oh if life were so simple. It took us a good few months more to really finish the system and to go through the different iterations of refining what it was we wanted tweaking workflows accordingly.
Well I have to say I’m very impressed. The level of information, examples, Gems, Plugins etc is just fantastic.
I don’t profess to be the greatest coder in the world, but it’s been a fun process to learn ruby from scratch and to take a site from idea to reality.
This is the first website I’ve built from scratch, prior to building GiftTRAP Live I has skills in Visual Basic.
I’ve simply bought a handful of Ruby and Rails books and used the web.
I’ve had some initial guidance from the odd friend along the way.
Well now we get to see how it works, how it scales etc etc
There is still loads more to do, more features, cooler graphics, more gift ideas, but at least we got there.
I’d like to thank my good friend Bernie Dekoven first came up with the twist of an idea we needed to make this a reality.
We hope you like it.
Check it out. It’s free and very simple to get going - you hardly notice that you are registering.
I’ll write another post to name the components we’ve used
I found it incredibly helpful to have found other sites detailing the components they used.
What’s coming? Well were thinking about a Facebook app, we also have some Instant Messaging integration to test out and we want to let people create their own gifts.
Got any bright ideas. Let is know.
Meanwhile have fun playing GifTTRAP online or in the flesh.
Ruby on Rails Rocks