Reel Connections
A Game for People Who Really Know Their Movies
Posted July 27th, 2026
(If app is “asleep” press button to get it back up)
What is Reel Connections
Reel Connections is a game that allows users to test their movie and actor knowledge in the form of a game inspired by popular parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
How to Play
Users are given a random starting actor and random target actor. They then connect the starting actor to another actor through a film they both appear in, and repeat until they reach the target actor. The goal of the game is to reach the target actor in as few movie + actor combinations as possible. An alternate, more challenging game mode is featured as well, in which players once again choose movie + actor combinations to reach the target actor, but score higher the lower the total box office sales (adjusted for inflation) of their chosen movies is, incentivizing creative picks of less well-known movies over simply the shortest path to the target actor.
Background
This was initially a group project as part of a school assignment in my master’s program where we iteratively landed on this game idea. In fact, in the GitHub, we have included documentation written in the ideation phase that is evidently somewhat outdated.
The primary objective of this project was to exercise fundamental practices of the software engineering cycle, including but not limited to: data packaging, unit tests, modular programming, version control and collaboration, continuous integration, linting, etc. I would say we achieved this comfortably, having an entirely functional game with a purpose besides practice programming. However, the timeline for this project was aimed at “practice” much more than having a “polished product” for the user. As such, we did not have enough time to iron out every possible bug and implement some of the stretch goals we set out to add initially.
Many months later, I have picked this app back up as a quick small side project. I’ve fixed hopefully all of the bugs, cleaned up much of the code, improved the UI (admittedly still far from perfect), and added several features/expanded on the dataset. It is possible I will make further improvements and/or features in the future, though frankly, my motivation and interests are starting to drift towards new projects and ideas at least for now.
See the GitHub for more info.
Giving Feedback
If you run into issues/bugs, or have ideas on how to improve or add to the game, please feel free to create an “issue” on GitHub. I can’t promise I’ll actually respond or act on them, but it’s hard to say. Of course, you are also very welcome to fork the code and expand on it yourself (just follow the basic MIT license rules).