Crosswords
Crosswords is a word game in the spirit of Scrabble, on a unique
grid and with some options that make it a different (and more
interesting) game.
- The board is an octagon-diamond
grid, where the octagons hold the letters, and randomly
selected intermediate diamonds indicate letter or word bonuses.
- Bonuses not always in the same places, and score for any letter placed touching them.
- Octagons instead of squares, allow diagonal words to be visualized..
Words
can be restricted to the traditional horizontal and vertical
directions, or diagonal words can be allowed. If diagonal words
are allowed, making dense crosswords becomes more challenging because
there are more directions to match, and the option to allow other
connected letters is useful.
The
"Big crosswords" variant uses a larger board, and allows all the word play options by default.
Dictionary:
Crosswords uses a dictionary derived from the open source program Collins Zyzzyva,
which has roughly 280,000 words considered acceptable for scrabble.
A smaller, ordered set of roughly 38,000 words, is considered
common enough for general use.
Robots:
the robots are simple "hill climbing" robots, that just find the best
of immediately available words, but that is extremely effective when
armed with a complete dictionary. Weaker bots restrict the
vocabulary, but are still extremely challenging.
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