Themes
29 themes: five you pick because you like them, a seasonal calendar that rolls through the year on its own, and thirteen regional celebrations that only enter the rotation for rooms created in their locale. Every theme re-dresses the whole room — table felt, card backs, confetti — and invites two of its own emoji into the reaction tray.
Seasonal (auto)
New rooms default to 🗓 Seasonal (auto): the theme follows the calendar, resolving to the nearest holiday anchor every time the room is viewed — a standing room re-themes itself as holidays approach. The host can pin any specific theme in Room settings → Theme; picking "Seasonal (auto)" again unpins it. The home page always wears today's seasonal colors.
The year-rounders
| Theme | The room becomes | Tray guests |
|---|---|---|
| 🃏 Card table | Casino felt — deep green, gold accents. The default deal. | 🎲 ♠️ |
| 🚀 Outer space | Midnight navy with starlight — estimates from another planet. | 🛸 🌟 |
| 🏄 Surf | Tropical teal, beach-day energy. | 🌊 🤙 |
| 🎂 Birthday | Party purple; the confetti feels extra appropriate. | 🎈 🎁 |
| 🪩 Nightclub | Near-black with neon — sprint planning after dark. | 💃 🕺 |
The seasonal calendar
Each seasonal theme "reigns" while its anchor date is the nearest one on the calendar (roughly the window between its neighbors):
| Theme | Anchor | The room becomes | Tray guests |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🎊 New Year | Jan 1 | Champagne midnight — gold on black. | 🎊 🕛 |
| 🧧 Lunar New Year | Feb 1 | Lantern red and gold. | 🧧 🐉 |
| 💘 Valentine's | Feb 14 | Rose and berry. | 💘 🌹 |
| 🍀 St. Patrick's | Mar 17 | Shamrock green. | 🍀 🌈 |
| 🌸 Easter | Apr 5 | Soft lavender, pastel confetti. | 🐣 🌸 |
| 🌷 Mother's Day | May 10 | Warm terracotta and tulips. | 🌷 💐 |
| ☀️ Summer | Jun 21 | Golden hour, all day. | 🍦 😎 |
| 📚 Back to School | Aug 25 | Amber chalkboard-and-pencils. | 📚 ✏️ |
| 🍂 Fall | Sep 22 | Burnt orange, falling leaves. | 🍂 🌰 |
| 🎃 Halloween | Oct 31 | Haunted purple-black. | 🎃 👻 |
| 🎄 Christmas | Dec 25 | Evergreen and snow. | 🎅 ⛄ |
Regional celebrations
Rooms remember the locale they were created in, and these anchors only join that room's seasonal rotation — a German team's late-September room dresses for Oktoberfest, a French one skips the 4th of July and celebrates Bastille Day, and Thanksgiving stays an English-locale affair. Any host can still pin any of them manually, locale regardless.
| Theme | Anchor | Rotation for | The room becomes | Tray guests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🎭 Carnaval | Feb 17 | pt | Rio night — purple stage, gold & green sparkle. | 🎭 🥁 |
| 🌸 Hanami | Apr 1 | ja | Dusk over the sakura trees. | 🌸 🍡 |
| 🎠 Feria de Abril | Apr 15 | es | Flamenco red, lantern light, lunares. | 🎠 💃 |
| 🌽 Festa Junina | Jun 24 | pt | Bonfire night, bunting over the arraial. | 🌽 🎪 |
| 🎆 4th of July | Jul 4 | en | Deep flag blue; red-and-white fireworks. | 🎆 🦅 |
| 🎋 Tanabata | Jul 7 | ja | The Milky Way between Orihime and Hikoboshi. | 🎋 ⭐ |
| 🐂 San Fermín | Jul 7 | es | Pamplona whites and red scarves. | 🐂 🧣 |
| 🥖 Bastille Day | Jul 14 | fr | Bleu-blanc-rouge over a Paris night. | 🥖 🍾 |
| 🏮 Obon | Aug 13 | ja | Paper lanterns on a warm indigo night. | 🏮 👘 |
| 🥨 Oktoberfest | Sep 20 | de | Bavarian sky, lozenge tablecloth, beer gold. | 🥨 🍺 |
| 💀 Día de Muertos | Nov 1 | es | Marigold path through the purple night. | 💀 🌼 |
| 🥂 Beaujolais Nouveau | Nov 19 | fr | The cellar door opens — burgundy and warm gold. | 🍷 🧀 |
| 🦃 Thanksgiving | Nov 26 | en | Warm oven browns. | 🦃 🥧 |
Hover any tray emoji for its label — the seasonal guests have opinions ("🌰 tough nut to crack", "👻 ghost of sprints past", "🎅 ho ho hopefully a 3").
What a theme changes
Palette (felt, accents, card backs), confetti colors, and the two tray slots. Link previews match too: sharing a room URL renders a social card in the room's theme.
Under the hood a theme is one block of --sp-* CSS custom-property
overrides in src/styles.css — custom properties inherit into shadow DOM,
so every component follows automatically. That also makes a new theme one
of the easiest contributions to the
open-source repo: a token
block, two tray emoji, and one script run to generate its social card.
Where the idea came from
Seasonal auto-theming has a lineage: it started as a CodePen experiment and grew up in Name Draw — a Secret Santa name-drawing app with twelve themes that match the current month — before landing here as today's twenty-nine-theme calendar. Some ideas just want to re-decorate.