Ouija board Christmas lights a la "Stranger Things" wall
You have the basic idea down. The only thing about this is that you will need a lot of wire, and 26 switches.







simulate this circuit &ndash; Schematic created using CircuitLab

You could wire the leds to use a common ground wire of the led string.

3V may be too low for full brightness on some of the leds. A 3x AA pack would be better.

You will need a resistor though. Assuming 20mA at 3.3V,  you need 4.5V - 3.3V = 1.2V / 0.02A = 60 Ohm. Find the next value up. This would be wired between the battery and the switches.

If you don't want to solder the wires,  then you need a terminal bus bar or similar.

An addressable led string would be simpler, only needing coding. Here is an example. It would also allow you to show a message without having to manually hit the switches in the right order. Heck, make it fancy, like add a bluetooth module and control it from a iPhone or Android phone.