HiveMind

The daily Reddit game where you don't answer what's right — you answer like everyone else. Watch the honeycomb reveal the crowd and score your Hive Sync %. Can you read the hive?

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Inspiration

Reddit is the biggest crowd on the internet, so we wanted a game you win by reading that crowd instead of beating it. Two things collided: the party game "Herd Mentality" (where you score points for writing the same answer as everyone else) and the daily-habit loop of Wordle. Put them on Reddit, where every subreddit is its own little culture, and you get a game about the wisdom (and the madness) of crowds. There are no right answers, only popular ones.

What it does

Every day, Hivemind drops a themed pack of five opinion questions into a community. You pick the answer you think the crowd will pick, and a honeycomb reveal shows the real live distribution: your pick gets ringed, the hive's top choice lights up, and the percentages count up. Your score is your Hive Sync %, how well you matched the crowd across the five questions, with a rank from Hive Mind down to Lone Wolf.

The hooks that bring people back:

  • Daily packs and day streaks (Wordle-style).
  • A per-subreddit daily leaderboard and an all-time points board.
  • Per-community answer cultures: because storage is siloed per subreddit, r/cooking and r/movies grow completely different "correct" answers.
  • User-written questions: members submit their own hive questions, moderators approve them, and approved questions auto-assemble into a credited "Community Hive."
  • One-tap "share my result" that posts your Hive Sync into the comments, which turns every reveal into an argument ("I can't believe 61% said pineapple").

How we built it

Hivemind runs entirely on Reddit's Devvit Web developer platform.

  • Client: a DOM/CSS single-page game for all interaction (reliable native taps, crisp type), with a Phaser canvas layered behind it purely for juice: ambient honeycomb drift and confetti bursts when you match the hive. There are no image assets. The whole "honey on charcoal" identity, hexagons and all, is drawn in CSS and canvas, and it ships with a full light/dark theme switch.
  • Server: Devvit's serverless endpoints on Hono, in TypeScript.
  • Data: Redis, siloed per subreddit. Vote tallies are hashes keyed by promptIdx:optionIdx; answers are locked with hSetNX so nobody can vote twice or change a pick; daily and all-time leaderboards are sorted sets; streaks live in a global hash with day-gap grace logic. Each built-in question also ships a small hand-authored "crowd prior" so the very first player still sees a believable hive, with real votes stacking on top and quickly taking over.
  • Fresh content: a scheduler cron posts a new hive every day, and one is posted on install. The UGC approval queue is consumed before falling back to the built-in pack rotation.
  • Quality: the pure scoring and content logic is unit-tested, the whole thing is strict-typed and linted, and it is concept-complete and close to launch quality.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest one was input. We first built the entire game inside a Phaser canvas, and taps felt dead and laggy inside the Reddit webview because canvas hit-testing on touch is unreliable there. We re-architected the game as a DOM-first app and demoted Phaser to a non-interactive effects layer, which fixed responsiveness and made the UI far crisper at the same time.

Other good problems: the cold-start "empty reveal" (solved with crowd priors), keeping scoring fair and idempotent so returning players can't double-count, and fitting a five-question flow plus a results screen into a phone-sized webview without scrolling.

What we learned

How to build real apps on Devvit Web, how to design around a serverless request model and a Redis subset (hashes and sorted sets instead of scans), and, the hard way, that for text-and-choice UIs the DOM beats a game canvas for both reliability and polish. Phaser earned its place as the celebration layer, not the input layer.

What's next for Hivemind

A global cross-subreddit "meta hive," image and this-or-that prompts, seasons with themed packs, and a richer reveal animation. The Community Hive pipeline means the questions can eventually be written entirely by the players.

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