Letterphile: one letter, every direction

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About

When I was in school, my teacher used to play this game to our class. You add one letter turnwise and try to make a word. Later, I tried searching for this game but didn't find the exact match anywhere. The closest was Scrabble, but it was too complicated. So, I decided to build my own.I did make some modifications to make the game more challenging and fun. Back then, we would start with a blank board and also score 2 letter words. Here, the game gets prefilled with random letters so the game becomes more different each time. No scoring for two letter words. The best thing that I added was the combos. If your letter makes 2 or more words, you will get a multiplier for each subsequent word, so the challenge becomes finding a way to score more combos.Initially, I wanted to assign values to each letter like Scrabble, but after running multiple AI-to-AI experiments, I concluded that having flat values per letter increases variances in the game and also reduces the first turn advantage to 0. I still added the weighted game mode if you would like to give that a try as well.And I also added daily puzzles where you get 5 boards, and you need to find the best spot and best letter that scores the most. You can share the Wordle-like result to your friends.You can also play directly on the web at https://play.letterphile.comor free download in the App Store at https://apps.apple.com/app/letterphile/id6783277017