July 13, 2026

Lex Run: A Word Roguelite Inside Reddit

TL;DR: I shipped Lex Run for the Reddit hackathon: a word game with Balatro-style roguelite runs that you play right inside a Reddit post. Almost everything in the stack was new to me (Phaser, Devvit, even Reddit as a platform), and the biggest lessons were: prototype the mechanic first, and treat juice as a feature, not polish.

I just shipped Lex Run for the Reddit hackathon: a word game you can play right inside Reddit.

I’ve been fascinated by Balatro and how it turns a familiar card game into something you can’t put down, so I wondered what would happen if I combined that roguelite formula with a word game. In Lex Run, a run is a series of rounds that get harder as you go, with buff cards to pick between rounds. Daily challenges are seeded, so every player gets the same run and competes on a shared leaderboard.

How It Plays

A run is 4 rounds of escalating difficulty. You tap letters from a rack of 7 tiles to build words, and longer words score disproportionately more. Beat each round’s target score before the timer runs out, and between rounds you pick one of three BOOSTs that reshape how you score.

The daily challenge is the hook. The date itself is the seed, so everyone gets identical racks and BOOST offers, and scores are directly comparable on the leaderboard. The server re-derives the run from the seed and re-scores every submission, so the client’s number is never trusted.

What I Learned

What made this project fun: I was new to almost everything in the stack. New to Phaser, new to Devvit, and honestly new to Reddit as a platform. Some things I learned along the way:

  1. Prototype the mechanic first. Combining Balatro-style runs with word building sounded good on paper, but it only clicked after prototyping how buffs, scoring, and escalating rounds feed into each other. Getting that loop to feel right was the real design work.
  2. Good templates matter. Devvit’s Phaser template ships with both the frontend and the backend wired together, so I could go from idea to something playable on Reddit fast instead of spending days on setup.
  3. Juice is the feature. My main focus was making the core gameplay fun and delightful: tight tap-to-select UX, satisfying animations, sound, and feedback on every action. Players feel this stuff more than any individual feature.
  4. Performance is design too. Rendering rounded rectangles at runtime was costing me. Replacing them with pre-made sprites packed into a texture atlas made everything smoother.
  5. AI as a design partner. I reworked the entire look and feel with the help of Claude’s design capabilities, and Claude was my pair programmer throughout the build.
  6. Inkscape is worth learning. I picked it up to make the UI sprites myself.
  7. Remotion is a gem. I learned Remotion to make the trailers: writing video as React code means the trailer stays in sync with the game, and re-rendering after a change is just another build step.

What’s Next

Porting Lex Run to mobile.

You can play Lex Run now at r/lexrungame.