While hundreds of Airtable builders were gathering in New York City for the first ever Airtable Buildathon, hundreds of you were also working hard virtually on your community hackathon submissions! Our second community-led hackathon’s theme was “Let’s Play,” and showed us anything is possible when you mix Airtable, creativity, and a bit of mischief 💫😉
Participants competed across three categories:
- Airtable AI: Recognizing the best use of AI features (selected by Alex McDonnell,
@alexmcdonnell , Airtable’s Director, Product Marketing) - Grand Jury: Selected by a committee of top Airtable builders
- Basefluencer: Awarded to the most-liked video on YouTube
First, a big shout out to
Airtable AI Winner: "Friends with Airtable" by Lisa Bauer (@itslisabauer )
Friends with Airtable is an educational RPG game designed to rid any initial fear of learning a new tool by introducing you to the basic Airtable features alongside beloved characters from Friends so that you feel more confident and excited to use the tool to improve your life!
Basefluencer Winner: "Telephone Pictionary!" by Erica Pascual (@Erica-Pascual )
Basically AirTable-ifying the Telephone Pictionary Game! Telephone Pictionary is a party game alternating between writing sentences and drawing pictures to hilariously distort an original phrase.
Players sit in a circle, each with a stack of paper, writing a sentence, passing it left, drawing the new sentence, and passing again, folding to hide previous steps. So instead of paper and passing it around, AirTable will generate the rounds and let each player know when it's their turn to write or draw, then you can see the entire round on a page as well as see the progression of each round and full game of rounds.
Congratulations on another Airtable Community Hackathon win, Erica!
Grand Jury Winner: "Last Admin Standing" by Nicholas Akins (@NickEFSJ )
You play as the Last Admin inside a haunted workspace. Movement is live, combat is live, enemies swarm in real time, and as you level up you build out your loadout with different tools and weapon behaviors.
What I wanted to prove with this project is that Airtable can be more than a place to store game data. It can actually act as the control layer for a playable game.
Here, the game is running in a custom interface, but Airtable is driving the important systems behind it. I have records for players, runs, upgrades, enemies, bosses, configs, daily challenges, and visual entities.
So for example, if I go into the Control Room, I can switch the active incident, switch the run profile, and route to a different boss. Those changes are coming from Airtable records, and they affect the live game state and run behavior.
When a run ends, the results write back into Airtable. Scores, kills, level reached, selected upgrades, and run outcome are all persisted, and player stats update as well. So the game isn’t just rendering in Airtable, it’s actually using Airtable as its backend.
The AI piece is where I wanted to do something more custom. Instead of making AI control the moment-to-moment gameplay, I used Airtable AI fields as a creative system.
In this VisualEntities table, each major entity has a record: the player, enemies, and boss. Airtable AI generates things like silhouette breakdowns, palette suggestions, JSX or SVG-style construction ideas, and motion notes. So AI is helping define the visual language of the game in a structured, record-based way.
That means Airtable AI isn’t just producing flavor text. It’s helping generate the art direction and implementation guidance for the characters and enemies in the game.
So the overall idea is: gameplay runs in the custom interface, Airtable controls the data and progression, and Airtable AI helps generate the creative direction for the game systems and visuals.
Most people use Airtable to track work. I used it to build a live action game with configurable systems, persistent run history, and AI-directed entity design.
This is Last Admin Standing.
Thank You to Our Amazing Community
To everyone who participated, thank you for making this second hackathon another success! The creativity we witnessed in all of the submissions has been inspiring, and we love to see how you're all pushing the boundaries of what's possible with Airtable beyond work.
If you participated in this “Let’s Play” hackathon, we'd love for you to share your submission in our Show & Tell board on the Airtable Community and answer any questions that other members have about what you built.
We can't wait to see what you'll build next and stay tuned for more opportunities to build alongside each other virtually and IRL!