HIVEMIND — Can you read the crowd?

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  Score three ways + the Bronze→Hive Mind rank ladder

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  The 4-step loop (Answer → Read the crowd → Reveal → Climb)

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  The "SURVEY SAYS" reveal board with your answer highlighted — the money shot

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  Cover

Inspiration

Wordle proved one daily question can become a habit. Family Feud proved that guessing the crowd — not the correct answer — is endlessly argue-able. HIVEMIND fuses the two into a game that only works because it's on Reddit: the community is both the puzzle and the answer key.

What it does

Every day, one prompt — e.g. "Name a movie everyone pretends to like." You don't give the right answer; you try to match the answer the crowd gives. You make two reads: your answer, a guess at what % of people said the same, and a prediction of which answer finishes #1. Then a Phaser "SURVEY SAYS" reveal assembles the crowd's mind on screen and scores you across three axes — Answer Match, Estimate Accuracy, and Prediction Battle. Climb Bronze → Hive Mind, keep a streak, and share a spoiler-free 🟩🟩⬜ grid.

How we built it

• Devvit Web app: a Phaser 4 client in the expanded webview, a Hono serverless backend, and Redis for state — all @devvit/web.
• The entire scoring/tally engine is framework-free TypeScript, unit-tested (27 tests) off-platform, then dropped into the server unchanged.
• Each post is seeded with a starter crowd, so the board is full and self-explanatory the moment a judge opens it — no waiting for a community to form.
• The reveal is a single deterministic Phaser timeline: word-swarm → board-flip → match-burst.

Challenges we ran into

• Answer normalization is the make-or-break detail — grouping charger, phone charger, and chargers into one row. We ship normalization + a synonym table and always display the grouped label.
• Building scoring test-first caught two real bugs before they ever hit Reddit: a normalizer that mangled short words (bus → bu) and estimate points being paid on answers that weren't even in the tally.
• Staying Reddit-native, not Reddit-themed — the rules warn against games about karma/subreddits. HIVEMIND is about collective human behavior; the topics are universal.

What we learned

The comment section can be the game. A daily "guess the crowd" loop turns every answer into content and every reveal into an argument — exactly the retention engine Reddit rewards.

What's next

Semantic answer-clustering for cleaner boards, weekly themed events, and a "Chaos" bonus for reading the contrarian crowd.

Built With

• css
• devvit
• devvit-web
• hono
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• phaser.js
• reddit
• redis
• typescript
• vite
• webview