Poker Slam

Poker Slam is an iOS puzzle-strategy card game. You're given a 5x5 grid and a stream of playing cards, and your job is to place each card so that the rows and columns form the strongest possible poker hands. Pairs, two pair, straights, flushes, full houses — every line on the board scores like a poker hand, and the layered scoring rewards planning ahead instead of just placing cards greedily.

The game lives in the same family as solitaire and puzzle-grid games like Threes or 2048: simple rules, short sessions, surprisingly deep decision space. It works well on a phone in five-minute slices.

How it was built

Poker Slam was built end-to-end by Akhil Dakinedi (@a_kill_ on X) using Cursor. Akhil has written a two-part series on Medium documenting the build — "Vibe Coding My Way to the App Store" — which describes shipping the game in roughly 10-15 hours of total work, "fully vibe coded from idea to App Store." The posts walk through everything from the initial prompt-and-iterate loop with Cursor to the App Store submission, the inevitable rejection-and-fix cycles with Apple review, and the small UX polish that pushes a vibe-coded prototype into something that feels like a real game.

The fact that the entire app — Swift code, game logic, scoring, UI, App Store submission — came together over a working day or two of focused effort is a big part of the story. It's one of the cleanest examples in 2025 of "single developer plus Cursor equals shipped iOS game."

Why it matters

Poker Slam is a useful data point for what's now possible solo. Card-based puzzle games used to require weeks of iteration on game feel and edge cases; here, that loop got compressed into hours because most of the boilerplate Swift and SwiftUI was being generated by Cursor while the developer stayed focused on game design.