Portmanteau!

Portmanteau is a daily word game where players get two clues and combine their answers into a single word or phrase to solve the day's puzzle

Comment

Inspiration

I’ve been running Portmanteau as an iOS/web app for over a year, where it's reached the top 20 word game apps on Apple’s App Store charts. The positive response encouraged me to bring the experience to Reddit. I believe the community aspect of Reddit will add a fresh layer of engagement and creativity, where users can discuss the day's game right there in the app post comments.
Portmanteau on the App Store

What it does

Portmanteau is a daily word puzzle game where you receive two separate clues. Your goal is to solve both and then seamlessly merge their answers into one single word or phrase. There’s a three-strike system for incorrect guesses and three hints to help those who need a nudge. It’s a playful and challenging blend of puzzle-solving and linguistic creativity that’s easy to pick up but hard to put down.

How we built it

I handcraft daily portmanteaus sometimes weeks in advance. The Reddit app fetches the latest puzzle data from a Firebase instance, ensuring everything stays up to date. The scheduling system handles daily updates, so all you need to do is jump in and start guessing. The reddit app stores the daily puzzle and user guesses/hints/scores for up to three days, after which the cache expires. Any expired posts will point to the latest daily puzzle. I'm considering a system to store all the previous daily puzzles, but ideally this would be an in-app purchaseable feature.

I built this app with all new code using Interactive Posts + reddit's Blocks UI for a great native reddit feel. It works in both dark and light mode, as well as for mobile and desktop sizes.

What’s next for Portmanteau

I plan to introduce a user leaderboard, giving top solvers their time in the spotlight and a more social experience. Additionally, I’ll include difficulty ratings to show what percentage of Redditors solved the daily puzzle correctly, making each daily challenge even more engaging and interactive.

Share this project:

Updates