Smelt Solitaire

Inspiration

I sat down and thought - what is the simplest game I could make in a short amount of time? I love card games and so I started to think about how I could make a game the only involves 4 cards. I wanted a game the works well on mobile and on Reddit. So it all find of fell into place.

What it does

Smelter Solitaire is a strategic daily card game where you drag cards from a 2x2 board to build sequences on your two piles. Cards must be ±1 rank from your pile's top card (7 can take 6 or 8), or match the suit.

When you match suits, both cards melt away—removed from the game entirely. This reveals the card buried beneath, potentially unlocking new moves or saving you from a dead end. But there's a catch: melted cards don't count toward your final score.

Your goal? Clear all 54 cards from the deck. Your score? Total cards remaining in your piles at the end. Strategic melting is key—use it to escape tight spots or reveal game-winning cards, but melt too much and you'll tank your score.

How we built it

I generated most of the code using the Antigravity IDE and various AI large language models such as Claude and Gemini.

The game is coded in React/Typescript

Challenges we ran into

I'm finding that the trickiest thing to making Reddit games is the leaderboard logic with daily puzzles. There's so many little decisions and details that go into it. I easily spend at least half the dev time on my game making the leaderboard, deciding whether to use local time or UTC standard for puzzle resets. I don't have enough experience in this to know which is better than the other, but I'm sure I'll find out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is my second game that I've made and deployed on Reddit. I'm proud of the fact that I followed through on not just one but two games to production.

I'm pretty happy with the smelting animation. Instead of using a heavy duty animation package I used a svg animation/filtering and it ended up looking great.

What we learned

Developing on Reddit/Devvit platform is great because you don't have to worry about login, auth, etc and you already have a user base and social platforms and discovery. Time will say whether it's all worth it, but with the Devvit platform and Apps on Reddit being relatively new it seems like there's a lot of potential here.