Guess the Vibe

A daily community guessing game for Reddit. Guess the cryptic clue, keep your streak alive, and climb the leaderboard ,with puzzles your community submits.

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Inspiration

Reddit's Devvit platform makes it possible to build a genuinely native, community-driven game, not just a bot bolted onto a subreddit. We wanted something that felt like Wordle for Reddit communities: a single daily puzzle that gives people a reason to come back, but built around inside jokes and community culture instead of generic trivia. The idea was simple, what if the comment section became part of the game itself?

What it does

Every day, a subreddit gets one cryptic clue: an emoji riddle or one-liner pointing at something the community would recognize a running meme, an inside joke, a bit of sub lore. Players guess directly inside the app. Wrong guesses unlock progressively more hints (up to 5 tries) and a hot/cold closeness meter shows how close each guess was, using a blend of edit-distance similarity and shared-word overlap so near-misses still feel rewarding.

Daily and all-time leaderboards, plus a streak system that resets on a missed day, reward players who come back consistently. Players can also submit their own puzzle ideas from inside the app — moderators review the queue and promote the best submissions into the live rotation via a subreddit menu action, so the puzzle bank grows to reflect each community's own culture over time.

How we built it

Built on Reddit's Devvit platform (@devvit/web), using a Hono server for the API, Redis for all persistence (puzzle bank, per-user daily state, streaks, sorted-set leaderboards, and a FIFO submission queue), and a React + Tailwind client for the Play / Leaderboard / Submit tabs.

One design choice we're proud of: the daily puzzle rotates with zero cron jobs. Today's puzzle is picked deterministically from the puzzle bank using the UTC day index, so every player in a subreddit sees the same puzzle on the same day automatically.

Challenges we ran into

Redis's client here doesn't support list primitives (lpush/rpop), so the community submission queue had to be built as a sorted set scored by submission timestamp instead — a small workaround that turned into a clean FIFO queue. Getting the app correctly registered and named on Reddit's developer platform also took some trial and error working through the CLI's account-verification flow.

What we learned

Devvit's webview + server architecture (Hono, Redis, React) is a genuinely productive stack once you're past initial setup — most of the game logic (closeness scoring, streaks, leaderboards) is plain TypeScript with no platform-specific gymnastics required.

What's next

Swap in real subreddit-specific puzzles once launched in an actual community, expand the "Best Use of User Contributions" angle with visible credit/flair for approved puzzle submitters, and add a lightweight moderator dashboard for reviewing the submission queue instead of one-at-a-time approval.

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