Hangman Hook

Inspiration

We loved how Wordle turned a simple word game into a shared daily ritual, but the magic was always Reddit-shaped: one puzzle, everyone playing it, arguing about it in the comments. The problem with most daily games is that they run out of content. Reddit doesn't have that problem, because it's a content engine with millions of people who love to stump each other. So we asked: what if the community wrote the puzzles, and Reddit itself was the game board? Hangman was the perfect canvas, because it's instantly understood, endlessly remixable, and begging for a competitive hook.

What it does

Hangman Hook is a Reddit-native, user-generated Hangman platform built on Devvit. Players can: Play instantly with a built-in 17,000-word dictionary, meaning there's always a fresh random word, no setup required. Create puzzles by picking a word, adding an optional hint, choosing a difficulty, and optionally attaching gameplay modifiers. Each puzzle becomes its own shareable interactive Reddit post. Take the Daily Challenge: one word for everyone each day, carrying randomized modifiers that rewrite the rules: Vowel Tax: a wrong vowel counts as two mistakes. Eyes: two bonus guesses, one for each eye. Double or Nothing: at exactly two lives, wager them on a single letter: hit and gain two, miss and it's over. Compete by earning points for solving (with speed, no-mistake, and daily-streak bonuses) and climb a global solvers leaderboard plus per-puzzle boards. It runs entirely inside Reddit with a polished, mobile-first Phaser UI in Reddit's dark theme.

How we built it

Frontend: Phaser 3 + TypeScript, bundled with Vite, rendered in a Devvit webview. Custom vector-drawn UI (gallows, keyboard, letter tiles, iconsi) so it looks identical on every device. Backend: A Devvit Web serverless Express app with Redis for persistence: puzzles, user stats, streaks, likes, and sorted-set leaderboards. Shared core: A framework-agnostic layer of pure game logic, scoring, and the modifier system, used by both client and server so they never disagree. Anti-cheat design: The answer never reaches the client. Guesses are resolved server-side (masked letters only), while the client owns the modifier-driven life math. Content: We processed the google-10000-english 20k list into a clean, frequency-ordered, profanity-filtered dictionary of 17,476 words, with deterministic daily word + modifier selection so everyone shares the same challenge.

Challenges we ran into

The Devvit bundling rabbit hole. Our server bundle threw a cryptic "Plugin RPC malformed error." It turned out Devvit's build-pack re-bundles your server and externalizes only the @devvit/protos root to wire up Redis/Reddit RPC. We'd inlined everything, which broke the plugin layer — but externalizing too much caused "Cannot find module @devvit/web/server." The fix was bundling everything except the exact @devvit/protos root, plus ignoreDynamicRequires to tame protobuf's dynamic require()s. CLI version whiplash. A stray devvit init from an older global CLI silently downgraded our project from 0.13 to 0.12 and rewrote package.json, so we learned to pin to the local CLI. Redis has no plain sets. Likes had to be reworked onto sorted sets, and rank math (ascending vs. descending) had to be derived by hand. The usual gauntlet: app registration chicken-and-egg, transient S3/DNS upload failures, and submitCustomPost having no splash (we used postData to link posts to puzzles instead).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A genuinely fun hook: the daily wildcard modifiers, especially Double or Nothing, turn a familiar game into a nerve-wracking gamble that's the same for everyone, every day. Playable on day one and scalable forever: the dictionary makes it instantly fun, and user creation makes it bottomless. A clean, emoji-free vector UI that feels native to Reddit and crisp on mobile. A server-authoritative design that keeps leaderboards honest without ruining responsiveness. Modifiers that work seamlessly across the daily word and community-made puzzles, so creators get real design space.

What we learned

A good "hook" is a rules twist, not just a theme. Small mechanics like vowel weighting or a two-life wager create more tension. Determinism matters for social games, so a shared daily experience only works if the word and its modifiers are reproducible for everyone.

What's next for Hangman Hook

More modifiers and weekly themes and community voting on which ones headline the daily. Richer hints. Social depth, like "challenge a friend" mentions, head-to-head duels, and subreddit-vs-subreddit events. Creator recognition, such as featured puzzles, badges, and a "puzzle of the week." A better name.

Built With

• devvit
• phaser.js
• typescript
• vite