FAF Daily

A daily "guess the unit" game for Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance — in the style of Wordle/Loldle. One mystery unit per day (same for everyone, UTC). Guess any base-faction unit; the grid reveals which attributes match.

• Faction · Tech · Unit/Building · Domain · Weapon · Yields · Role · Mass · HP · Build · Abilities
• 🟩 exact match · 🟨 partial / close · 🟥 no · ↑/↓ answer is higher / lower
• 286 base-faction units (Aeon/UEF/Cybran/Seraphim). Nomads excluded.
• Unit build-icons are hotlinked from the FAForever/UnitDB repo via the jsDelivr CDN (with a faction-colored fallback), so no images are bundled.
• Answer resolved server-side (see server/): the daily/challenge pick and every grid comparison are computed by a small Node service behind a secret, so the answer never reaches the browser until you've solved it — you can't read it from devtools or recompute it from the bundle. No accounts. The SPA still holds the unit list for search (that isn't the answer).

Architecture

• src/ — the React SPA (static, served by nginx).
• server/ — a dependency-free Node service (run with tsx) that resolves the answer (server/answer.ts), builds the board (server/state.ts), and serves POST /api/daily/state. It reuses the same src/lib logic (compare, challenge, units) so the rules live in one place.
• In production the nginx container serves the SPA and reverse-proxies /api/* to the api container on the private Docker network.

Develop

npm install
npm run server       # answer API on :8090 (needed for the game to work)
npm run dev          # http://localhost:5174 (proxies /api -> :8090)
npm run typecheck && npm run typecheck:server
npm run build        # -> dist/

Regenerate the unit list

Drop a fresh FAF unitlist.json export into scripts/source-unitlist.json, then:

npm run build:units  # rewrites src/data/units.json

Deploy

Two containers via compose — web (nginx: SPA + /api proxy, published on host :8081) and api (the answer service, internal only):

docker compose up -d --build   # web on host :8081; api is internal

Point your edge reverse proxy (e.g. daily.replays.doodlepros.com → VM-IP:8081) at the web container exactly as before — nothing else to configure.

The api container generates a random answer secret on first run and persists it in the daily-secret volume, so answers stay stable across restarts. To control it yourself, set DAILY_SECRET (a long random string) in docker-compose.yml. Note: changing/losing the secret reshuffles every future answer, so keep the volume (or a fixed DAILY_SECRET) intact.