Daily Minesweeper

A seeded daily Minesweeper per post on Reddit. First click is safe, progress persists per user, and fastest clears top the daily leaderboard. Share your run in the comments.

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Inspiration

I wanted a daily game that feels native to Reddit: quick to learn, competitive, and easy to share in comments. Minesweeper is instantly recognizable, and the “daily” mechanic makes every post feel like a shared challenge.

What it does

Daily Minesweeper generates one deterministic board per Reddit post per UTC day. Players reveal tiles, flag mines, and race to clear the board. Each player’s progress is saved, the first click is safe, and wins are recorded to a daily leaderboard. At the end of a run, the game generates a compact share block you can paste into the comments.

How we built it

  • Devvit Web app with a React + TypeScript UI
  • Hono backend routes for init/reveal/flag/reset/leaderboard
  • Daily board generation uses a seeded RNG derived from (postId + UTC date)
  • Per-user state stores revealed cells, flags, start time, and status
  • First-click safety relocates a mine only when the very first reveal would hit a mine
  • The leaderboard persists with the fastest completion times for the day

Challenges we ran into

  • Making “first-click safety” work without breaking the daily fairness (kept the daily seed stable and only overriding per-user when absolutely necessary)
  • Getting mobile interactions right (tap reveal + long-press flag)
  • Ensuring uploads/build output matched Devvit’s expected dist/ structure
  • Handling intermittent upload/publish issues and making the deploy pipeline reliable on Windows

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A complete daily loop: seeded board, persistence, restart, win/loss, leaderboard, and share flow
  • Clean mobile UX with long-press flagging
  • Social layer: share-to-comments and a daily speed leaderboard

What we learned

  • How to design a daily game mechanic that is deterministic and fair
  • How to ship a full-stack Devvit Web app end-to-end (UI + backend routes + build/publish pipeline)
  • How to iterate quickly on a game UX that works on both desktop and mobile

What's next for Daily Minesweeper

  • Difficulty modes (still daily-seeded)
  • Better visual polish (animations, accessibility, haptics)
  • More robust leaderboards (friends/subreddit filters)
  • Daily streaks and optional achievements

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