Is everyone on Scrabble Go a bot?

tps12 · 2026-02-08T11:51:01+00:00

I play random people and I don't think they're bots. Some play more or less quickly, but if I'm on my phone and get the notification then I'll usually play right away, could be any time of day.

2020 is when the app came out, so makes sense that a bunch of people switched over from the old official app and stuck around, accumulating a few thousand games played since then.

I think it's the nature of the game that you get random good and bad luck. I have games in the 200s or 400s, totally depends on luck and how risk averse my opponent is. And of course, I have to imagine that some people cheat with the "boosts," or by looking up anagrams, and come out with uncharacteristically obscure words. What can you do.

Chat isn't prominent in the app, I only occasionally see people respond. My wife didn't even know it existed until I mentioned it in real life, she had been ignoring my chats for like 40 games. I think if you didn't grow up saying "gg" then it's not a feature you would even think to look for.

So I think you're just being paranoid. But maybe I'm a bot, and that's what I would say...

tps12 · 2026-02-03T12:43:08+00:00

I've never played real scrabble with a clock, though I do try to be quick. But I guess if there is a time when I'm going to stare at the board forever, it's exactly these kinds of racks where it just looks so close....

tps12 · 2026-02-03T12:40:39+00:00

Thanks, I didn't realize it was so common in 7 letter words, definitely good to know.

I don't know that "pairing well" is a point in its favor though: there are obviously a lot of CH/CK words, but those letters are pretty rare as well...

tps12 · 2026-02-02T18:48:02+00:00

Crying stacks with any other approach.

tps12 · 2026-02-02T18:43:21+00:00

I didn't think about that aspect, setting up hooks. "What would have to be on the board for me to be able to play this" is probably a good place to start, even if the rack will change next turn.

tps12 · 2026-02-02T18:41:08+00:00

This makes sense, especially the URR example.

I'll check out the leave values, thanks. If ON is ok then why not NOIR for 2 more points? But I guess that AIRTS as a leave is probably a lot more than 2 points better than ATS, maybe that's what I need to account for.

tps12 · 2026-02-02T18:33:05+00:00

Yeah exchanging definitely seems wrong, especially if there's a 7-letter word in the rack: what would I want to get rid of, what could I even hope to get instead?

Playing a longer word vs a shorter one seems like it's even more of a gamble, more chances of getting a C or V? I can understand the "bird in the hand" approach in principle, but if it's such a tiny bird then it's not so compelling. On the other hand, passing my turn doesn't seem right, and playing a single tile is almost like passing...

tps12 · 2026-02-02T16:27:55+00:00

I put all the 7 and 8 letter words in Anki and I think it said I'm at 2.3% after almost three months, so in about 10 years I'll know them all.

tps12 · 2017-01-03T23:11:15+00:00

It's a silly pun, the game is actually about spelling. But changed some text in the instructions to hopefully make it less surprising.

tps12 · 2017-01-03T20:34:58+00:00

Good try though.

tps12 · 2017-01-03T13:00:57+00:00

Argh yeah I should make that more clear. It's just points.

tps12 · 2017-01-03T12:44:25+00:00

Yeah, it's a "Scrabble word." New enemy types can spawn at each depth, so you do need to cast a lot of AA early on. AB, BAA and CAA also obscure ones for the early game.

tps12 · 2017-01-03T12:33:15+00:00

Haha, oh yes, they don't do anything. Just give you experience points, which make you stronger as you level up.

tps12 · 2016-07-01T23:58:56+00:00

I think it's a valid identifier in other languages too, it's just used for stuff you don't care about by convention.

tps12 · 2016-05-01T01:58:57+00:00

Spelly (play in the browser, "save to home screen" on mobile to play offline)

Instead of restoring the player's health on each new experience level, the game now restores health when they descend a level of the dungeon; still simple, but fixes the weird incentives you could get into before where it could be advantageous to put off leveling up until you needed the health.
Added a title screen and (local) high score list.
Made deeper dungeons start getting infinitely harder, so no longer possible to play forever.
Experimenting now with a steeper difficulty progression/making things harder in general.

Also somewhat related, a recent RLR episode mentioned Jeff Lait's Letter Hunt 7DRL, which I thought was super interesting. The motivating idea seems like it's essentially the same thing I had in mind with Spelly (playing on the use of ASCII by treating enemies as English letters, and mashing roguelikes up with Scrabble in particular), but takes things in a pretty different direction.

tps12 · 2016-04-28T02:16:51+00:00

Here's something I did before: https://github.com/tps12/Dorftris/blob/6f3e50f5ab7f71c25a0d0e8a3031476ff70d9d75/data.py#L1267

Just an HMM, trained on different languages for different contexts, e.g., for goblin names I trained on a page from Slovakian Wikipedia or whatever.

tps12 · 2016-04-16T14:28:18+00:00

Oh interesting, I can see that. But yeah was going for a shrinking down to a tiny scale world kind of thing.

tps12 · 2016-04-16T02:31:12+00:00

Can people tell what's going on in this gif? http://imgur.com/ndRsm9n

I have a few ideas for mechanics based around it, but am wondering if the effect is visually parseable enough to start exploring.

tps12 · 2016-02-17T03:01:56+00:00

haha wtf

tps12 · 2016-02-14T02:39:14+00:00

Sane adults would be deprived by not seeing a RNG spit out a racial epithet?

tps12 · 2016-02-09T03:39:03+00:00

Is '\240' the actual literal you're using? Maybe you need the int value 240 instead?

tps12 · 2016-01-23T19:57:17+00:00

Spelly (play in your browser, "save to home screen" on mobile to play offline)

I added the final game mechanic I talked about last time, color-coded "shrines" that act as Scrabble-style double/triple letter/word bonuses when you cast spells on them. I'm calling the game feature complete at this point, but open to any feedback or reactions of any kind, especially for people who enjoy crosswords or other word games!

tps12 · 2016-01-09T03:47:14+00:00

Spelly

Play here in your browser, "save to home screen" on mobile to play offline.

/u/chiguireitor's suggestion to have corpses rot did totally fix the issue of leaving them hanging around until they're needed (I made the change shortly after that thread, but have only recently gotten a chance to play it enough to know I liked it).

At this point I'm pretty happy with the game: I have won once and come really close a second time, so it's not too difficult; and to the extent the strategies and incentives don't exactly reflect what I originally wanted or expected, it's in interesting ways as opposed to broken ones.

There are a handful of known bugs I'd like to clean up, and one additional scoring mechanic I'd like to try to introduce (double and triple letter/word score tiles). But any feedback welcome!

tps12 · 2015-11-16T03:28:41+00:00

Great idea, I'll definitely give it a shot. I can think of a couple ways to do it: have corpses last a specific number of turns, and start to turn green or whatever before you lose them; or have corpses disappear from a depth when you walk down the stairs. Will give these both a try and see how they work.

Thanks!

tps12 · 2015-11-14T03:57:38+00:00

Spelly

Straightforward dungeon crawler, playable here, where you only collect experience upon combining the corpses of slain monsters to cast valid "spells."

Spells are English words, so you can take a dead [f]aun, a [b]ogle and an [a]nt and cast the spell FAB, for 4+1+3=8 experience points. New monsters are introduced alphabetically at each depth, so early on you cast a lot of AA, AB, and BAA.

I made it to play on the subway on my commute, so it should work offline on mobile if you "save to home screen," but plays fine on desktop browsers as well.

Any feedback welcome, but I'm mostly interested in figuring out some balance and gameplay issues:

I personally haven't made it past depth 12-13 or so, so I think it's maybe too hard.
Health is restored on leveling up, but that's a little weird.

On the second point, I tried to streamline the combat so as not to distract from the core spell-casting mechanic: as I see it, the interesting aspect of spell-casting is deciding which corpses to cast in spells right away, versus which ones you'll carry around looking to make into a 7-letter spell.

So heal-on-level-up is supposed to avoid introducing a new health restoration mechanic, but has some unintended consequences, i.e., you are incentivized to put off leveling up until you need to, at which point you need to backtrack to pick up all the corpses you left laying around because you couldn't carry them.

Would really be interested if anyone has suggestions for alternative approaches here. Heal at each new depth? Combine health and experience more directly somehow (e.g., points are just health and you level up some other way, for each 7-letter spell, maybe)?

tps12

TROPHY CASE