Pick-A-Partridge: A Festive Game On Reddit

On a rainy November weekend, I decided to test drive the Devvit framework, designed for creating apps and games within the Reddit ecosystem. Within a day or two, I had built the first version of Pick-A-Partridge. It’s a festive game of memory, themed around the Twelve Days of Christmas, which will become clear from the backing music when you come to play it.

The game now has its own subreddit, r/pick_a_partridge, which is where you can play. A lot of people are!

The game itself is a memory game with the pairs being represented by the various gifts from the famous song. The goal is simply to turn over all the matching pairs in as few moves as possible. There are three difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard) with each one containing a larger number of pairs to find.

There is a new game post every day in December in the lead up to Christmas, plus some warm-up games in late November. There is a page to track your daily progress, and a leaderboard where you can compete with other players.

This type of work is outside my usual domain but, given its inadvertent success, I felt the need to share it via the blog reel. During December, you’ll be able to find a direct link on my website’s header via the Christmas tree that looks like this:

Growth

This little side project had humble beginnings, but then interest grew very quickly. Then this happened: it to went to Generally Availability (GA) as Reddit agreed to feature my game. And this just in time for Christmas!

Now, at the time of writing, I’m proud to say that r/pick_a_partridge has over 800¹ subscribers and 2,500 weekly players!

Reddit also allows you to track “Engagement” metrics over time, which broadly correlates with the number of users playing Pick-A-Partridge. The chart below shows a line graph of the growth in popularity, from version 1 in mid-November and throughout the course of December. When you sustain a 7-day average of 500+ engagers, then the app hits what Reddit defines as the “Tier 1” Award in its Developer Fund guide. In the graph, this is indicated by the green shaded area, and represents a real milestone!

Devvit

Devvit is the developer platform for Reddit, which allows you to build apps and games for Reddit. I had a particularly good experience with the Devvit development server, which allows you to edit and deploy instantly, much like running website changes as normal on localhost, except that it gets embedded directly on Reddit’s servers. Pretty cool!

When building, you do have a “playtest” environment that allows you to run your experimental changes against a private subreddit in near-real time, before releasing a production version on the main sub.

When building apps, you need to provide both the client and the “server” code - the latter is where your server-side code interacts with Reddit’s via the Devvit API. Data storage comes in the form of scalable Redis caches that are provisioned for your subreddits. This is a minor limitation over a fully-fledged database, but is somehow an acceptable compromise in exchange for using their servers as a data store.

There is also a great community centred around the Devvit ecosystem. I am indebted to them for their support over the last few weeks whilst I was getting warmed up and encountered plenty of bugs that I could not have resolved without them. That goes to both the Moderators and the other dedicated (and helpful) developers. There are two points of contact: a) the subreddit r/Devvit and b) the Devvit Discord server - I’d recommend saying ‘Hi 👋’ on Discord if you’re planning a project in this space.

Vibes

This project would not have been possible (in a reasonable time frame!) without the use of AI coding agents. I partially, and responsibly, vibe-coded the game’s UI using a combination of Cursor 2.0, Claude Sonnet/Opus, and the dedicated Devvit MCP server. The latter allows your context window to hook directly into their docs.

In my experience, vibe-coding still requires a lot of human oversight, testing and, very often, intervention. With that said, it nonetheless allowed a huge development speed-up, carrying out a lot of the rote work (and fiddling around with CSS!).

I have not yet open-sourced the code, but I will edit this post with a link to the codebase when I do. Watch this space.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very happy with the progress I made in just a few days of development, and with the attention my game has received on Reddit. Plus, it was ready in time for the Twelve Days of Christmas!

Along with the thousands of other users, I hope you enjoy playing Pick-A-Partridge.

🎄 Happy Holidays! 🎄

• Game
• Reddit
• TypeScript
• React