Play The Game

League themed: https://sh.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends_tdh/comments/1r1rjcs/tragedeigh_february_11_2026/

Lana themed: https://www.reddit.com/r/lanadelrey_tdh/comments/1r1rjct/tragedeigh_february_11_2026/

Formula 1 themed: https://sh.reddit.com/r/formula1_tdh/comments/1r1rjcq/tragedeigh_february_11_2026/

NBA themed: https://sh.reddit.com/r/nba_tdh/comments/1r1shzu/tragedeigh_february_11_2026/

Make sure to click on the topics on the end screen of the game to see where they came from :)

Inspiration

As someone who's used Reddit since my teens, I one thing I notice is that people spend more time on r/home now. I enjoy Reddit as a individualized subreddit experience, and wanted to build a game to draw people away from the home feed back into subs.

While brainstorming here, I remembered the "tragedeigh" meme where people share funny baby name spellings and it made me realize phonetics have funny little puzzles in them. What if you could turn any phrase into a phonetic word scramble and challenge people to decode it?

What It Does

I have it on a few subreddits now! Obviously not on the main sub since I'm not a mod there, but I have shadow subredits where you can play the game.

Each day, the app generates 3 rounds of increasing difficulty tailored to the subreddit it's installed in by pulling topics from the community's top posts. Players see a clue like "I Scream" and race to type the original phrase ("Ice cream"). A timer runs across all 3 rounds, and your total time earns you a percentile ranking against everyone else in the subreddit that day.

How We Built It

I thought this was going to be a walk in the park. It was not. Not even close.

For all games, as a base, I have a feature-based phoneme distance system on top of the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (140k+ words). Vowels are scored by height/backness/rounding; consonants by manner/place/voicing. A hybrid DFS + beam search finds all ways to split a phrase's phoneme sequence into real dictionary words, with difficulty controlled by a single distance threshold parameter. A daily cron job fetches the subreddit's top 25 posts, sends them to Gemini Flash to extract discussion topics, then runs those topics through the phonetic pipeline to generate that day's puzzles. The LLM also suggests a theme color for each subreddit. If the LLM fails, algorithmic keyword extraction kicks in as a fallback. Answer validation uses Levenshtein distance ≤ 1, with stripped articles so no one malds when they get it slightly wrong.

Challenges We Ran Into

The hardest problem was tuning the phoneme distance thresholds when looking for words. Too strict and we couldn't generate puzzles at hard difficulty. Too loose and clues didn't sound anything like the answer. We ended up building a "phonetic fidelity" scoring component that penalizes clues whose phoneme sequence diverges too far from the original. The algorithm naturally favors short, common words because they just fit better in more scenarios, which led to clues that were either too obvious or repetitive. We added progressive word-count penalties, spelling-overlap detection (penalizing clues that visually resemble the answer), and word frequency filtering by difficulty tier to find the sweet spot. Getting meaningful puzzles from arbitrary subreddit content required a two-tier approach. I used an LLM for creative topic extraction and the algorithmic pipeline for phonetic validation because neither alone was reliable enough. The LLM sometimes suggested phrases which just did not fit the phonetics at all, while the algorithm almost always missed the most interesting topics.