System Design Arcade

System Design Arcade turns system design interview prep into interactive arcade-style games. No more passive reading or hour-long videos — learn by doing.

TWO TRACKS:

CONCEPT ARCADE (10 games)

Master one building block at a time:

• Caching — Redis, CDN, eviction policies

• Databases — SQL vs NoSQL, indexing, ACID

• Load Balancing — algorithms, health checks, scaling

• Sharding — partitioning strategies, consistent hashing

• CAP Theorem — consistency vs availability tradeoffs

• Networking — DNS, TCP/UDP, HTTP, WebSockets

• API Design — REST, GraphQL, rate limiting, versioning

• Async Processing — message queues, pub/sub, event-driven

• Replication — leader-follower, quorum, conflict resolution

• Estimation — back-of-envelope calculations, capacity planning

PROBLEM ARCADE (14 games)

Design real systems end-to-end:

• URL Shortener, Rate Limiter, Chat System, News Feed

• Instagram, YouTube, Uber, Dropbox, Twitter

• Typeahead, Yelp, Ticketmaster, Web Crawler, Google Docs

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT:

• 24 games, 120 levels, 480+ interactive challenges

• 6 challenge types: multiple choice, ordering, fill-in-the-blank, API builder, architecture builder, and more

• Each game has 5 levels from fundamentals to scale

• Instant feedback with detailed explanations

• Track your progress with scores and streaks

• No subscriptions, no ads

Built for software engineers preparing for system design interviews, or anyone who wants to understand how large-scale systems work.