isc.ro is one of the most old school, classic, and beloved Scrabble servers, but its implementation is really outdated and has some notable vulnerabilities/bugs. For example, the rack tiles seem to be randomly generated on the clientside, and passwords are plaintext. For a modern alternative, woogles.io is much nicer.
The board looks like a regular scrabble board, but the special squares are indicated only with colours, and don't say 'Triple Word Score' etc. like on the real Scrabble board. When you hover over a square, you see the bonus as '2x letter' etc.
This behaviour is fine for experienced players, but not for children or beginners, especially those playing on iPads, which don't have 'hover'.
Even if you don't play often, his scrabble videos are fantastic to watch on a lunch break.
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My friends and I are playing around with vibe coding a 4+ multi player scrabble, surprisingly it doesn't really exist. (hasbro is extremely tight on their copyright)
I made a multi-player (up to 12 players) Scrabble-like game. Everyone submits their turn at the same time so there are no long waits between turns. It's a "capture territory with words" game.
Even if it does exist, it may not use the "Scrabble" trademark, making it difficult to search for. For example, one time I forgot what Woogles was called and had trouble finding it again since it doesn't mention Scrabble at any point. I had to use an LLM to remind myself what it was called.
Don't do what I just did, and waste several minutes on a puzzle. As soon as you hit "Give up," or presumably submit the valid answer, all it does is say "auth-methods-failed."
I lost too much time having fun playing Wordfeud on iOS, had to go cold turkey and uninstall it. (No idea how they dodged the copyright issues, it seems like straight-up scrabble to me...)
There's no copyright on game mechanics, if I understand correctly. You can protect stuff like the game's name, the artwork, unique characters, and the text in the rulebook - but not the purely mechanical rules themselves.
I seem to recall that Scrabble's board layout could be an issue. The specific placement of double/triple word/letter squares is not merely an important game mechanic, but also a distinctive feature of the brand. There's also the question of letter-tile point-values, and whether those specific points could be copied verbatim.
Source: I played a MUSH where players managed to reproduce games like Boggle and Scrabble for the amusement of other MUSHers
Cool!
For anyone looking to practice, I've made two daily games featuring similar concepts:
https://clickword.org - use tiles to form words, placed words disappear, get as many points as possible.
https://spaceword.org - build a valid word grid using as little space as possible
Here’s another one that I made: https://danieljanus.pl/wladcyslow/ – rearrange 9-letter words into grids of 5-letter words
isc.ro is one of the most old school, classic, and beloved Scrabble servers, but its implementation is really outdated and has some notable vulnerabilities/bugs. For example, the rack tiles seem to be randomly generated on the clientside, and passwords are plaintext. For a modern alternative, woogles.io is much nicer.
Submitted quite a while ago, if you wanted to resubmit it for its own discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24789018
Also, for convenience: https://woogles.io
Woogles is nice.
The board looks like a regular scrabble board, but the special squares are indicated only with colours, and don't say 'Triple Word Score' etc. like on the real Scrabble board. When you hover over a square, you see the bonus as '2x letter' etc.
This behaviour is fine for experienced players, but not for children or beginners, especially those playing on iPads, which don't have 'hover'.
I made a userscript to fix this:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/508773-woogles-bonus-label...
I love scrabble, it may be going through a growth spurt at the moment, kind of like chess after all the netflix movies.
Everyone should follow Will Anderson, he runs an extremely high quality Youtube channel -> https://www.youtube.com/@wanderer15
Even if you don't play often, his scrabble videos are fantastic to watch on a lunch break.
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My friends and I are playing around with vibe coding a 4+ multi player scrabble, surprisingly it doesn't really exist. (hasbro is extremely tight on their copyright)
I made a multi-player (up to 12 players) Scrabble-like game. Everyone submits their turn at the same time so there are no long waits between turns. It's a "capture territory with words" game.
http://crosswordislandhopper.com/cih
The capturing territory part reminds me of Truncate which I absolutely love (and absolutely hate the UI): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882873 -> https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate (MIT)
Even if it does exist, it may not use the "Scrabble" trademark, making it difficult to search for. For example, one time I forgot what Woogles was called and had trouble finding it again since it doesn't mention Scrabble at any point. I had to use an LLM to remind myself what it was called.
Don't do what I just did, and waste several minutes on a puzzle. As soon as you hit "Give up," or presumably submit the valid answer, all it does is say "auth-methods-failed."
I cofounded and built a large part of woogles. It’s free software (https://github.com/woogles-io/liwords)… AMA
I lost too much time having fun playing Wordfeud on iOS, had to go cold turkey and uninstall it. (No idea how they dodged the copyright issues, it seems like straight-up scrabble to me...)
> No idea how they dodged the copyright issues
There's no copyright on game mechanics, if I understand correctly. You can protect stuff like the game's name, the artwork, unique characters, and the text in the rulebook - but not the purely mechanical rules themselves.
I seem to recall that Scrabble's board layout could be an issue. The specific placement of double/triple word/letter squares is not merely an important game mechanic, but also a distinctive feature of the brand. There's also the question of letter-tile point-values, and whether those specific points could be copied verbatim.
Source: I played a MUSH where players managed to reproduce games like Boggle and Scrabble for the amusement of other MUSHers
Wordfeud uses a different board layout.
It's awfully close though
.ro is the Romanian TLD, which explains why "Romana" is one of the language options (Although it's not using the correct diacritics)
In 2002 diacritics were such a pain, or impossibility even :)
Poland has kurnik.pl (meaning “chicken coop”) with a version of scrabble called “Literaki”. It’s been around for years.
It actually predates ISC, dating back to 2001. These days you can play actual Scrabble on Kurnik, too!
ISC also supports Polish (with OSPS).
This got me through lockdown. Good to see it's still around.
kind of dope, whats your stack/how'd you build it?
"isc" -> Internet Scrabble Club, for those of us who didn't know
I assumed as much given the title of this post.