Letter Feud

Inspiration

We wanted to build something for Reddit's "Games with a Hook" hackathon that captured a genuinely different psychological loop than the usual daily word game. Most word games (Scattergories, Wordle spinoffs) reward being clever or unique. We were drawn to the opposite idea — inspired by Family Feud's "guess what the crowd said" mechanic — and asked: what if a daily word game rewarded matching your community's collective mind instead of standing out from it? That inversion became the whole hook.

What it does

Letter Feud gives each subreddit a daily set of 5 categories, each paired with its own letter. Players have 60 seconds to submit one answer per category. Instead of scoring for correctness or uniqueness, answers are scored by how closely they match what the community has historically answered — the more common your answer, the more points you earn. Every new answer also gets added to that subreddit's living "board," so the game's scoring data organically grows and reflects each community's specific culture over time. Players can pick up right where they left off if they close the tab mid-game, and a daily streak counter rewards consistent play.

How we built it

Built on Reddit's Devvit Web platform using the React template — Vite, Hono for the server, and Redis for persistence. The scoring pipeline normalizes and validates each answer, ranks it against a per-category Redis-backed board, and awards points based on rank (or a small participation credit for brand-new answers, which simultaneously seeds the board for future players). We designed the UI with an original Family-Feud-inspired oval badge and layered "chrome" lettering, built as a custom SVG/PNG rather than reusing any existing trademarked artwork.

Challenges we ran into

Early on, we lost access to our original Devvit developer account mid-hackathon, which meant re-registering the app under a new account and working through app-name collisions, subreddit permission mismatches, and Devvit CLI re-authentication — all under time pressure. We also had to work through a genuine design tension: our board-matching mechanic has no reliable way to check whether an answer actually fits a category (only that it starts with the right letter and isn't yet in the data) — a limitation we discovered is shared even by established apps in this genre, which typically resolve it with large manually-curated word lists.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting a full day-based game loop working end-to-end — start screen, live countdown with auto-submit, server-persisted resume state, scoring, and an animated results reveal — all backed by real Redis storage rather than mocked data. We're also proud of designing a scoring mechanic that's genuinely different from typical Scattergories-style games, not just a reskin.

What we learned

A lot about Devvit's Redis-based storage model, Hono routing patterns for Reddit apps, and the practical realities of building an asynchronous, community-driven scoring system without real-time multiplayer. We also learned firsthand how quickly assumptions about UI-library choices (like assuming we needed Phaser) can be reconsidered once you look closely at what a game's actual mechanics require.

What's next for Letter Feud

Deterministic daily rotation of categories/letters instead of a static daily puzzle Decay-weighted board aging, so the board reflects recent community trends rather than accumulating forever A "Trailblazer" bonus for players whose earlier novel answers later catch on Community-submitted and curated categories A visible leaderboard per subreddit

Built With

• devvit
• hono
• react
• redis
• tailwindcss
• typescript
• vite