Bowldem for Reddit
Reddit Games Hackathon Submission
About the Project
Bowldem for Reddit is a port of Bowldem — a daily cricket puzzle game — to Reddit's Devvit platform. Built as a submission for the Reddit Games Hackathon, targeting the Best Daily Game category ($15,000 prize).
The idea was simple: cricket fans already live on r/Cricket and related subreddits. Instead of dragging them to a website, bring the puzzle to where they already are.
How It Works
Every day, a new puzzle post goes up. Players see a T20 World Cup match venue and scorecard with team names hidden. Five guesses to identify the Man of the Match. Each guess gives feedback on whether the player was in the match, on the right team, playing the right role.
Results render as emoji grids that players can share directly in the comments — the same viral loop that made Wordle spread, but native to Reddit's community mechanics.
The Build
Devvit is Reddit's app platform — TypeScript, server-side rendering, tight integration with Reddit's post and comment APIs. The migration from vanilla JS (web Bowldem) to Devvit's reactive framework was the bulk of the work. Puzzle data, scoring logic, and the daily rotation system all had to be rearchitected for Devvit's server-client split.
What I Learned
Platform constraints shape the product. Devvit's sandbox limitations meant rethinking things I took for granted on the web — no arbitrary DOM manipulation, no client-side storage, different auth model. The puzzle had to be simpler and more self-contained than the web version, which turned out to make it better as a daily drop.