August 27, 2025
By Mathias Hansen
A crazy idea that turned into a fun mashup of software and hardware...and all of it with Laravel
As a co-organizer and the MC of Laravel Live Denmark, I was tasked with helping to come up with an idea for entertainment during the conference.
Entertaining on stage gets me pretty excited. Inspired by PHP Jeopardy, we decided to give Laravel Jeopardy a go this year.
But this wasn't going to be just Jeopardy.
I decided to go a little bit wild and build an entire Jeopardy game platform, including physical buzzers with Taylor Otwell announcing the team that buzzed in. And do it all using Laravel—hardware included.
Let's dive in to how it was built.
The plan
The initial thought was to use the existing JeoPHPardy project, but I quickly discovered that the repository hadn't seen updates in 11 years and that it was referencing a buzzer system that doesn't appear to be sold anymore.
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