SubCipher

Inspiration

I am a little obsessed with cryptic and daily word games. Wordle, the Washington Post crossword, the Indian newspaper crosswords I grew up solving, and honestly almost any daily cryptic I can get my hands on. SubCipher came from one question: what if the daily puzzle was not a single word, but a whole Reddit community, and the clues were the exact things that make that community recognizable to the people already in it.

What it is

SubCipher is a daily deduction game for Reddit. Each day points to one mystery subreddit through a riddle, a visual clue, and short cipher fragments. Players have six guesses. The board gives familiar Wordle-style feedback: green for the right letter in the right position, yellow for a letter that is in the answer but the wrong position, and muted tiles for letters that are not in the answer. If you have ever pegged a subreddit from one cursed thumbnail, you already have the only skill this game needs.

Why it fits Reddit

The answer is not a random trivia fact. Players infer a community from its habits, vocabulary, recurring jokes, and visual culture. There is one official puzzle per day, so the whole subreddit shares the same case. That makes the comments useful: people compare near misses, explain the reference, and describe how they recognized the community, all without spoiling the answer.

Features

One official, date-locked puzzle per day.
A riddle, a source image, cipher letters, and a caption fragment as progressive evidence.
Six-guess, Wordle-style feedback with duplicate-letter handling.
Server-authoritative attempts, results, scoring, streaks, and a daily leaderboard.
Scoring rewards solving with fewer guesses and less revealed help.
Explicit, spoiler-safe result sharing to a pinned daily score thread.
A scheduler that creates the daily custom post automatically.

How we built it

Built with React, TypeScript, Vite, Hono, and Devvit Web. The server uses Devvit Redis for attempts, results, streaks, leaderboard records, the daily puzzle lock, and score-thread state. The client never decides the answer or the score, which keeps a clever browser console from becoming a cheat sheet. Player-keyed records expire automatically.

Challenges we ran into

The real challenge was calibrating difficulty. Our early drafts were either solvable from the title alone or so cryptic that we lost to our own puzzle more than once. The progressive-evidence system exists so a hard case still has an honest path to the answer.

Retention

The loop is deliberately simple: one official solve per day, six attempts, progressive evidence, a streak, and a leaderboard. A new daily post gives the community a reason to return, and the shared answer gives the comment thread a common subject.

How to play

Open the daily SubCipher post on Reddit.
Read the riddle and the evidence.
Type a subreddit guess and submit it.
Read the green, yellow, and muted feedback tiles.
Reveal more evidence as needed, knowing that extra help lowers your score.
Solve within six guesses, then check your score, streak, and leaderboard placement and choose whether to post a spoiler-safe result.