Redeal Roguelike

Redeal is an exciting poker-based roguelike game built for Reddit. Play hands, discard cards, buy Jokers and Vouchers to create powerful score multipliers, and beat high-difficulty stakes!

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Inspiration

Redeal was inspired by the rising popularity of deckbuilding roguelikes and the tactical depth of card games. We wanted to see if we could recreate a high level of mechanical depth, synergy building, and strategic complexity natively on Reddit using the Devvit platform.

Our goal was to make a game that didn't feel like a simple gimmick, but rather a complete, polished, and extremely replayable roguelike experience. We wanted to turn subreddits into living game hubs where players compete, share daily challenges, build custom game modes, and customize their community experience.

What It Does

Redeal is a poker-themed deckbuilding roguelike running natively in the Reddit feed. Players play hands, score points, discard tactically, and buy items in the shop to reach Ante 8 and win the run.

Core Gameplay & Engine

  • Deep Synergies: Play poker hands to earn chips and multipliers. Boost your scores using rank modifiers, 150+ unique Jokers (e.g., Karma, Downvote King, The Troll, Deep Fried Meme), consumable Tarot, Planet, and Spectral cards, and persistent Shop Vouchers.
  • Card Customization: Enhance cards in your deck with variants (Lucky, Steel, Glass, Gold) and Seals (Red, Blue, Gold, Purple) to trigger massive score combos.
  • Boss Blinds: Defeat distinct bosses at the end of each Ante that restrict your play style (debuffing suits, hiding cards face down, or charging cash for discards).

Daily Challenges & Retention (Hook-y)

  • Automatic Daily Posts: A scheduled cron job automatically posts a new daily seed challenge to the subreddit at midnight UTC.
  • Daily Rewards Calendar: A beautiful, responsive calendar UI allows players to claim daily login points and build up consecutive play streaks (including cross-calendar year rollovers!).
  • Reddit Comment Leaderboards: For every game post, the server automatically updates a stickied, formatted Markdown leaderboard comment under the post, ranking players by score, rank, and ante.

Community Challenge Builder (User Contributions)

  • Interactive Designer: Users can design custom challenges directly within the app using an advanced, multi-step stepper modal. Customize starting money, hand size, slot modifiers, starting jokers, consumables, hand level upgrades, and deck rules (preset or card-by-card).
  • Gamified Sharing: Publishing a challenge automatically creates a custom Reddit post with the flair "Community Challenge".
  • UGC Rewards: If another player plays or wins your custom challenge, you (the creator) are awarded play/win points, incentivizing the community to share and play each other's custom rulesets.

Automated Subreddit Widgets & Coordination

  • Sidebar Calendar: The app builds a dynamic challenge calendar widget on the subreddit sidebar, rendering a clickable, live-updated calendar of the month's challenges.
  • Sidebar Navigation: Moderator controls automatically set up sidebar details, including description updates and quick-play button widgets.
  • Rule Coordinator: Moderation tools automatically sync community guidelines and rules, keeping the subreddit tidy.

How We Built It

We built Redeal with a modern, high-performance web tech stack integrated tightly with Devvit:

  • Backend: Runs in Node.js v22 serverless environment on Devvit. We used Hono for robust endpoint routing and tRPC v11 for end-to-end type safety between the client and server.
  • Persistence: All active run states, daily login calendars, user streaks, achievements, custom challenges, and leaderboards are persisted in Devvit’s Redis store.
  • Frontend: Built as a client-side single-page app inside the Devvit iframe using React 19 and Vite. Instead of a heavy game engine like Phaser, we opted for a lightweight custom React game board. This drastically reduced the asset bundle size, enabling the splash screen to render instantly in the Reddit feed.
  • Styling & Micro-animations: Styled using Tailwind CSS v4 with glassmorphism panels, animated gradient borders, and drifting custom background suit particles using the Motion library.
  • Sound: Utilizes the HTML5 Web Audio API to play responsive card flips, shop buys, and button click sound effects.

Challenges We Faced

  1. Serverless State Serialization: Because Devvit is completely stateless and serverless, every action (playing a card, purchasing a Joker, opening a booster pack) must round-trip to the server to prevent client-side score injection. We optimized our state payload serialization to keep Redis reads/writes lightning-fast.
  2. Scoring and Verification Math: Recreating complex card-evaluation math (evaluating poker hands, rank multipliers, left-to-right Joker triggers, and card editions/enhancements) required a highly optimized scoring engine. We wrote a secure server-side scoring algorithm (src/server/core/scoring.ts) and validated seed-based operations to guarantee anti-cheat integrity.
  3. Responsive Desktop & Mobile Layouts: Poker layouts require significant screen real estate. We spent hours designing an interface that folds gracefully into a streamlined stats-bar layout on mobile while presenting a full-panel control dashboard on desktop.

What We Learned

  • How to build fully type-safe serverless client-server communications with tRPC v11 on top of Hono.
  • How to utilize Reddit's built-in platform APIs (comments, flairs, and sidebar widgets) to seamlessly merge an external web-tech app with a Reddit community.
  • How to design a highly engaging, zero-AI-slop gaming loop that relies on the natural social dynamics of Reddit communities.

What's Next for Redeal

  • Custom Card Assets: Introducing custom, hand-crafted vector graphics for Jokers, Tarot cards, and booster packs.
  • Multiplayer Seed Duels: Allowing players to directly challenge friends to play the exact same seed in a head-to-head score duel.
  • Additional Challenge Modifiers: Adding even wilder boss modifiers and funny, Reddit-themed Jokers based on subreddit memes.

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Updates

posted an update —

Redeal Update: Version 0.0.207 is Live!

Hey everyone! We've just rolled out version 0.0.207 of Redeal on Reddit (built on Public API 0.13.6). This update introduces new progression systems, widgets, quality-of-life adjustments, and under-the-hood optimization for faster game loading.

Here is a breakdown of what’s new in this release:

New Progression & Features

  • Daily Login Rewards & Streaks: Keep your run going! We’ve added a daily login reward system with streak tracking. Log in daily to build your streak and view your progress in a new modal in the client.
  • Streak Freeze Perk: Missed a day? You can now acquire a Streak Freeze perk to protect your active login streak from resetting.
  • Subreddit Subscription Rewards: Join the community and get rewarded! Subscribing to r/redeal_game now grants you bonus points to kickstart your leaderboard climb.
  • Daily Challenge Calendar Widget: A dynamic calendar widget is now active on the subreddit, showing upcoming challenge configurations and automatically updating via daily scheduler tasks.

Quality of Life & UI Fixes

  • Intelligent Prompts: Added local dismissal states to prevent popups (like daily rewards or follow prompts) from appearing recursively and interrupting your flow.
  • Mobile Support Improvements: Integrated accelerometer and feature policy checks to prevent unwanted orientation tracking on mobile browsers.
  • Cleaner Stats Lookup: Standardized statistical lookups using new helper wrappers for user stats.

Performance & Infrastructure

  • Compressed Replay Storage: Game replays are now compressed before storing them in Redis, significantly reducing memory footprint and making replay loading near-instantaneous.
  • Global Caching Engine: Implemented server-side caching for leaderboard queries, community challenge configurations, and post metadata. Your games and leaderboards should now load much faster!

Thank you for playtesting and sharing your feedback! Let us know how the new daily login rewards and streak perks feel in the comments below.

Good luck on your runs!

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posted an update —

Redeal Roguelike is Hackathon-Ready!

We are thrilled to submit Redeal to the Reddit Hackathon! Redeal is a fully-featured, poker-inspired deckbuilding roguelike designed to run natively inside Reddit feeds using the Devvit platform.

Here is a log of what has been built and polished for this launch:

Key Features Implemented:

  • 150+ Synergistic Jokers & Card Customizations: Build crazy point engines with card modifications (Glass, Lucky, Foil, Polychrome) and seals.
  • Interactive Community Challenge Builder: Design custom deck rules, starting consumables, custom jokers, and money multipliers. Publishing a challenge automatically creates a flared post on the subreddit.
  • Reddit Comment Leaderboards: Play scores are validated on the server and automatically edited into a stickied leaderboard comment under each post in real-time.
  • Daily Rewards Calendar & Streaks: Claim points daily, build consecutive win streaks, and watch the next-reward timer tick down.
  • Subreddit Sidebar widgets: Automatically syncs community rules, sets up a text navigation panel, and maintains a clickable challenge calendar.

Tech Stack and Architecture Snippet:

We used tRPC v11 mounted over Hono for end-to-end type-safe client-server communication. By constructing a custom React-based board instead of importing a heavy game framework, we kept the bundle size extremely light, allowing the inline splash view to load instantly in the feed.

Here is a look at the RunState definition schema that gets serialized and saved to Redis on every player action:

export type RunState = {
  id: string;
  userId: string;
  postId: string;
  seed: string;
  deckType: DeckType;
  stakeLevel: StakeLevel;
  phase: Phase;
  ante: number;
  blindIndex: number; // 0: Small, 1: Big, 2: Boss
  score: number;
  targetScore: number;
  handsRemaining: number;
  discardsRemaining: number;
  money: number;
  deck: GameCard[];
  hand: GameCard[];
  jokers: JokerInstance[];
  consumables: ConsumableInstance[];
  handLevels: Record<HandType, number>;
};

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Submission history