DECOY — 1 treasure, 3 lies, 3 digs

A daily deception-heist. One player buries treasure and plants decoys that fake heat. You get 3 digs and private hot/cold signals — but decoys lie. Find it first to become tomorrow's Fox.

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DECOY: 1 treasure. 3 lies. 3 digs.

A daily deception-heist for Reddit. Every day, one player (the Fox) secretly buries a treasure on the board and plants three decoys that radiate fake heat. Everyone else gets 3 digs.

The hook

Each dig gives you a private hot/cold signal based on how close you are to the nearest heat source. But decoys lie. They read just as hot as the real treasure until you dig one and expose it. The twist: the Herd Map shows only where the community dug, never what they learned. So that crowded corner everyone's digging? It's either a blazing trail... or a trap the Fox set, and the whole herd is taking the bait.

The real game happens in the comments. Share your signals. Or lie about them.

Why you come back

Find the treasure first and you become tomorrow's Fox, which means you set the next board. Every single day's content is created by a player, not by us. At midnight UTC, an automated post drops the full reveal of the previous day's board (treasure location, decoy bait rate, first finder), then spins up a fresh board. Streaks track your daily returns. Daily and all-time leaderboards keep score.

Built to be trustworthy

All game logic runs server-side. The board layout never leaves the server. The client only sends a cell index and gets back a single signal, so nobody can sniff the answer from network traffic. The game never stalls either: if no Fox sets a board, one is generated procedurally under the same rules the Fox must follow.

How it fits the sub-challenges

  • Retention Mechanics: daily boards, streaks, scheduled midnight reveals, leaderboards.
  • User Contributions: every board is designed by yesterday's winner. The community makes the content.
  • Phaser: fully procedural rendering (zero image assets), particle-driven digs, screen shake, animated signal reveals.

Solo-friendly too: a player landing on a quiet post still gets a complete hot/cold game. The community layers stack on top rather than being required.

How it was built

Devvit Web (Hono server + Redis state) with a Phaser 4 client, TypeScript end to end. Daily cadence runs on Devvit's scheduler; reveals are posted as automated comments on the previous day's post.

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