Baghchal is live. The bot bounty is wired. USDC payouts are on-chain. But nobody knows about it yet.
That was the problem we were sitting with a few weeks ago. We had built something we were genuinely proud of — a digital version of a 2,000-year-old Nepali strategy game where you can defeat an AI and walk away with real money — and we had no distribution. No marketing engine. No content pipeline. Just a product sitting quietly in production.
We're not a marketing team. We're two people who care deeply about traditional Nepali games and know how to build software. Writing captions and scheduling posts was never the part we were optimizing for. But it was blocking everything.
So we gave Claude Code the whole problem. Not a narrow task. The whole thing. Design the posts, write the copy, build the scheduler, wire it to the Instagram API, get it posting automatically.
The first thing Claude Code did was ask how we wanted the carousel slides to look. Not what tool to use. Not what format. It asked what the post should feel like. We described the Baghchal aesthetic: dark, minimal, warm amber on near-black, old terminal energy. It took that and helped us build HTML carousel templates that matched the visual language of the game itself.
That was the core design insight we hadn't fully articulated before. The carousels shouldn't feel like social media graphics. They should feel like something from the game's world.
From there, the pipeline came together fast. Each carousel is an HTML file. Claude Code helped write a Python script that spins up a local HTTP server, uses Playwright to screenshot every slide at 1080×1080, and outputs production-ready images. Those images go into a post queue backed by a JSON file. A cron job runs hourly, checks what's due, and calls the Instagram Graph API to publish.
We planned seven posts for the first week. Each one about a different angle on Baghchal. Why it's a mathematically solved game. Why the goat side is harder than it looks. How Nepal gave this game to the world and the world mostly forgot. What makes it feel like Himalayan chess. The whole series was designed to teach people the game before they ever touch it.
Claude Code helped write the caption for every single one. We gave it the topic and the tone. It gave us drafts that actually sounded like us, not like a social media playbook.
The cron job has been running since May 28. Posts are going out on schedule. We haven't manually touched Instagram in days.
The thing I keep coming back to is that none of this required us to become marketers. Claude Code didn't automate a marketing workflow we already had. It helped us build one we never had, from scratch, in the time it would have taken to manually post three times.
For a studio building games about cultural memory and traditional play, that matters. The more time we spend on distribution infrastructure, the less time we have for the actual work. Getting that ratio right is still the hardest part of doing this at our scale.
The pipeline will break eventually. Some API will change, some token will expire, some edge case we didn't think about will surface. But for now it runs. And that's enough to keep going.