Poker Slam
Link adjacent cards on a 5×5 grid into poker hands and score until the deck runs out. A free iPhone puzzle game whose designer says Cursor wrote all of the code.
Links go to the official store or developer page. Last verified Nov 8, 2026.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- View on the App StoreApp StoreReleasedFree
Install from Apple's App Store on an iPhone or iPad.
Mobile · Apple App Store
About Poker Slam
Poker Slam is a free puzzle card game for iPhone and iPad. A 5×5 grid is dealt from a 52-card deck, and you select adjacent cards (in the same column one row apart, or in neighbouring columns one row apart, diagonals included) to form poker hands such as pairs, straights and flushes; the rarer the hand, the higher the score. Played cards clear, the cards above shift down and new ones are dealt into the lowest empty spots, so planning for the shift creates new hands. The game ends when no valid hand can be made from the grid and the rest of the deck. It includes small variants such as mini straight flushes, a hand reference guide, a high score shown on the main menu, haptic feedback and animated mesh-gradient visuals. The developer, Akhil Dakinedi, a designer of mobile apps for more than a decade, calls it their first app and describes building it as a native SwiftUI app with Cursor editing the project files while Xcode previewed them: “fully vibe coded from idea to App Store entirely with Cursor”, and “I didn’t write any of the code myself”. ChatGPT helped plan the project and write the first prompts for Cursor. The developer says the idea started from Balatro and the Queen's Blood card game in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and ended up closer to match puzzles such as Candy Crush. The core app took roughly 10–15 hours, and 60–80 hours with experiments and debugging. Released on 1 May 2025; the source code is public on GitHub.
How it was built
Partially verifiedIn a two-part Medium case study (27 May 2025) the developer describes running Cursor and Xcode side by side, with Cursor modifying the project files and Xcode building and previewing them, pasting Xcode errors back into Cursor and having it write unit tests for the card-shifting logic. Part 2 says: “My first app, fully vibe coded from idea to App Store entirely with Cursor” and “I didn’t write any of the code myself and didn’t really understand the details or the language”. The developer used only Cursor's free models with a $20/month Cursor Pro subscription, found Gemini 2.5 the best model at the time, and had to steer a large refactor one step at a time, pointing Cursor at specific lines of code; one particle effect did not work as asked, so the developer “had to manually hack it together step-by-step”. The repository holds a Cursor rules file.
- DeveloperPart 1 calls the post a case study of how the developer prototyped, built and shipped Poker Slam “to the iOS App Store using Cursor”, and describes the Cursor and Xcode workflow. — Medium (Akhil Dakinedi)
The developer wrote the game's rules in one prompt to ChatGPT (GPT-4o) and asked how to prompt Cursor to build it; ChatGPT suggested the project structure and produced a series of prompts that were pasted into Cursor, the first of which led to more than 40 Xcode build errors to work through.
A native iOS app in Swift and SwiftUI with an MVVM structure and a service layer (game state, card selection, connection drawing, score animation, haptics and poker-hand detection), built in Xcode with Cursor editing the files. Metal shader effects, mesh gradients and glyph animations were added late; a refactor split very large view and view-model files before submission. The repository passed 270 commits, per the developer, and Apple approved the build within 24 hours. The developer reports about 10–15 hours for the core app and 60–80 hours in total.
- Engine / framework
- None (Swift / SwiftUI)
- Languages
- Swift
- Team size
- 1 (solo)Developer ReportedMedium (Akhil Dakinedi)
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- ~100% of shipped codeDeveloper ReportedMedium (Akhil Dakinedi)
“I didn’t write any of the code myself and didn’t really understand the details or the language, but I knew enough about it to move entire pieces around like some wizard.”- [Pt. 1/2] Vibe coding my way to the App Store (Medium)
- [Pt. 2/2] Vibe coding my way to the App Store (Medium)
- PokerSlam-3 source code (GitHub)
Verification notes: AI use, workflow and time from the developer's two Medium posts (both 27 May 2025, about 01:27 UTC), read through Medium's RSS feed on 8 Nov 2026 because the pages refused direct requests; part 1 links the App Store listing and part 2 the GitHub repository. The 100% AI code share rests on the developer's “I didn’t write any of the code myself”; the developer also says one particle effect was put together manually step by step, which may mean by hand, so the share is the developer's own statement. App Store release date (1 May 2025), version 1.1 (27 May 2025, adding high-score tracking on the main menu), 4+ rating, English, iOS 18.2 minimum and seller Akhilesh Dakinedi from Apple's lookup data on 8 Nov 2026; the US store showed a 5.0 average from 5 ratings (observed; there is no App Store rating metric, so it is not recorded as one). Rules and features from the App Store description and the repository README (read through raw.githubusercontent.com; no licence file was found, so the code is public but not under a stated licence). Balatro, Queen's Blood and Candy Crush are the developer's own reference points for the idea. Team size 1 from the developer's “all by myself”. The app was not installed.
Development history
Released on the App Store.
OfficialApple App StoreVersion 1.1 adds high-score tracking on the main menu.
OfficialApple App StoreThe developer publishes a two-part case study on building the app with Cursor.
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
App Store (iOS)
Free on iPhone and iPad (iOS 18.2 or later); rated 4+. Apple's lookup data does not show in-app purchases.
Not publicly available: Gross revenue.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Pt. 1/2] Vibe coding my way to the App Store Medium (Akhil Dakinedi) | Devlog | May 27, 2025 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| [Pt. 2/2] Vibe coding my way to the App Store Medium (Akhil Dakinedi) | Devlog | May 27, 2025 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Poker Slam on the App Store Apple App Store | Store page | May 1, 2025 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| akhil-17/PokerSlam-3 GitHub | Repository | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
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