Pasalacabra

The daily word ring, one clue per letter A to Z, one 4-minute clock. Answer as many as you can before the goat runs out of time.

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Inspiration

Pasalacabra is inspired on a long-running Spanish TV game show that I watched with my grandma, who never missed an episode, and this one's for her. The other half was that too many Christmas dinners get eaten up by political arguments that could be a lot more fun by playing games instead. So, why not make the games?

What it does

Pasalacabra is a daily trivia word game on Reddit's Devvit platform. Every day at 06:00 UTC a new puzzle post appears in the subreddit with 26 clues, one per letter of the alphabet, each answer either starts with or contains that letter. Players type answers (typo/plural-tolerant), can pass and return to a letter later ("¡Pasalacabra!"), and race a 4-minute clock. Wrong answers reveal the correct one and lock the letter. Finishing produces a score (correct > fewest wrong > fastest time), a daily leaderboard, and a streak counter. Players can share their result as an emoji-ring image comment.

How we built it

Built on Reddit's Devvit Web platform: a Hono server + React 19 client, TypeScript throughout, Vite for the build. Game state, scores, and streaks live in Reddit's Devvit Redis storage, scoped per player/day. Each day's question set is pre-generated by a GitHub Actions workflow to fire an OpenAI API call to generate the question set and served to the app via a raw.githubusercontent.com fetch, validated defensively (26 well-formed A–Z clues, no duplicate answers) before use. A Devvit scheduler creates the daily post automatically at 06:00 UTC, with a moderator-only menu action as a manual backstop.

Challenges we ran into

Devvit let me ship a full game (React client, Node/Hono server, Redis, scheduled posts) straight into a native Reddit post, which is a distribution model I can't get anywhere else. The rough edge was that the client webview is fully sandboxed with zero external network access, and I only found that out mid-build instead of upfront in the docs. I originally wanted to call Azure Speech directly from the client and had to redesign around the fact that any external API call has to go through the server instead, which comes with its own issues of latency.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A fully automated daily-content pipeline (GitHub Actions → GitHub → Devvit app, no manual publishing step), typo-tolerant answer checking, a pass-and-return mechanic, and a share flow that posts results as a real Reddit comment.

What we learned

I did not know Reddit had such a nice compatibility to the one-game-a-day format, with a leader board, it feels like the perfect place to launch a mini-game and see how the community responds.

What's next for Pasalacabra

More question sets, difficulty levels, weekly/themed rings, and always more cabras 🐐

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