Pigeon racing is huge in Belgium, Poland and Taiwan, with hundreds of thousands of fanciers worldwide, but there are almost no games about it. So I built one: WingDerby, a Hattrick-style management game where you run a pigeon loft.
The unusual part is the stack: the whole multiplayer game runs as a WordPress plugin + theme.
Why WordPress?
I already needed WordPress for the content and SEO side: per-language URLs (/nl/, /fr/, …) with hreflang, XML sitemaps and JSON-LD. Once that existed, reusing its user system, routing and cron for the game itself was tempting. It meant I could spend my time on the simulation instead of on auth, i18n and admin screens.
What runs where
- Races, breeding, ageing, the market and bot lofts all run from WP cron jobs.
- Twelve federations (Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, South Africa, Brazil and more), each with its own season. Southern hemisphere federations race during the northern winter, so scheduling is hemisphere-aware.
- Per-player timezones, so a race that is released "at 09:00" makes sense wherever you live.
- Live race tracking while birds are on their way home.
- A Hattrick-style market with bidding, bid history and sales records. Bots can bid too, and that can be tuned all the way down to off.
Design rules I stuck to
- No pay-to-win. Nothing you can buy makes a pigeon faster.
- No seeded stats. Every pigeon's and player's record starts at zero; only races actually flown in the game count.
- Real terminology. Basketing, widowhood, cocks and hens, ring numbers per federation.
One gotcha worth sharing
On LiteSpeed hosting, requests for my sitemap URLs were answered with a 404 before WordPress ever saw them. The fix was to handle those paths explicitly in WordPress (via pre_handle_404 and template_redirect) so the server hands them over instead of short-circuiting. If your WP sitemaps mysteriously 404 on LiteSpeed, check that first.
Would I do it again?
For a slow, tick-based management game: yes. Nothing needs real-time sockets, most "gameplay" is scheduled jobs and database updates, and WordPress gave me a mature base for free. For anything fast-paced I would pick something else.
It's a solo project, free to play in six languages at https://wingderby.com. Happy to answer questions about using WordPress as a game backend.
