Hacker Remix

Internet Scrabble Club (2002-)

55 points by indigodaddy 2 months ago | 24 comments

oliwary 2 months ago

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

nathell 2 months ago

Here’s another one that I made: https://danieljanus.pl/wladcyslow/ – rearrange 9-letter words into grids of 5-letter words

porphyra 2 months ago

isc.ro is one of the most old school, classic, and beloved Scrabble servers, but its implementation is really outdated and has some notable vulnerabilities/bugs.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.

mdaniel 2 months ago

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

rahimnathwani 2 months ago

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...

thomasfromcdnjs 2 months ago

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.

---

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)

wdumaresq 2 months ago

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

mdaniel 2 months ago

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)

porphyra 2 months ago

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.

CamperBob2 2 months ago

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."

cdelsolar 2 months ago

I cofounded and built a large part of woogles. It’s free software (https://github.com/woogles-io/liwords)… AMA

chrisweekly 2 months ago

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...)

crote 2 months ago

> 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.

AStonesThrow 2 months ago

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

rockdoe 2 months ago

Wordfeud uses a different board layout.

chrisweekly 2 months ago

It's awfully close though

maest 2 months ago

.ro is the Romanian TLD, which explains why "Romana" is one of the language options (Although it's not using the correct diacritics)

przemub 2 months ago

In 2002 diacritics were such a pain, or impossibility even :)

macqm 2 months ago

Poland has kurnik.pl (meaning “chicken coop”) with a version of scrabble called “Literaki”. It’s been around for years.

nathell 2 months ago

It actually predates ISC, dating back to 2001. These days you can play actual Scrabble on Kurnik, too!

ISC also supports Polish (with OSPS).

pursuableproofs 2 months ago

This got me through lockdown. Good to see it's still around.

Aeroi 2 months ago

kind of dope, whats your stack/how'd you build it?

aw1621107 2 months ago

"isc" -> Internet Scrabble Club, for those of us who didn't know

Suppafly 2 months ago

I assumed as much given the title of this post.