Awesome

Features

• 🎲 Retryable draw — redo the draw if you are not satisfied with the picks
• 📏 Custom word length — play with standard 7 tiles or for any variant
• ⚙️ Custom draw configuration — minimum number of vowels and/or consonants per draw
• 🌐 25+ letter distributions — play in the language of your choice
• 💡 Word insights from dictionaries — reveal the number of scrabble/bonus/bingo and the words
• ⏱️ Game timer — thinking time per play

Installation

Manually

From source

go install github.com/wI2L/scrabbler@latest

[!NOTE] This will install the scrabbler binary in $GOBIN, which defaults to $GOPATH/bin or $HOME/go/bin if the GOPATH environment variable is not set.

Pre-compiled binaries

Download pre-compiled binaries from the Releases page.

Usage

Interface

The application presents itself as a terminal user-interface (TUI) which has two views:

• Draw view: displays the tiles that are randomly drawn from the selected distribution. You can either accept the draw or refuse it to generate a new one. Note that tiles that were not played in the previous round are kept and are not drawn again.
• Play view: allows you to enter the tiles that were played (the order you type them in doesn't matter). You cannot enter unavailable tiles.

Options

Table of contents

• Word length
• Draw requirements
• Predicates
• Tile points
• Game timer
• Letter distribution
• Custom dictionary

CLI Usage

scrabbler [flags]

Flags:
  -d, --dictionary string            custom dictionary file path
  -l, --distribution string          letter distribution language
      --vowels uint8                 number of required vowel letters
      --consonants uint8             number of required consonant letters
  -w, --word-length uint8            the number of tiles to draw (default 7)
  -p, --show-points                  show letter points in tiles
      --predicates key=[val],...     list of draw predicates
  -t, --timer duration[=5m]          enable play timer (default 5m)
      --debug string[="debug.log"]   enable debug mode
  -h, --help                         help for scrabbler

Word length

The official rule define a word of seven (7) letters, but you can change it using the -w/--word-length flags:

scrabbler --word-length=8

Draw requirements

The official duplicate scrabble rules states that a draw must always contain one vowel and one consonant. You can use the --vowels and --consonants flags to configure this behavior (disabled by default, the draw is completely random).

Unlike the official rules, the draws won't stop automatically once there are no more vowels or consonants to pick. However, you can choose to stop the game yourself.

scrabbler --vowels=1 --consonants=1

[!IMPORTANT] The sum of required vowels and consonants cannot exceed the configured word length.

Predicates

Draw predicates are builtin conditions that can alter or influence the outcome of a draw. Each predicate has a "maximum number of tries", after which it is ignored if it cannot fulfill its condition, to prevent the draw from never succeeding.

Duplicates vowels

The dup-vowels predicate caps duplicate vowel letters to a defined threshold. The threshold doesn't apply per-letter (2 A, 3 E) but for all letters at once (max 2 A and 2 E):

scrabbler --predicates="dup-vowels=2"

Tile points

The tiles of the draw can optionally show the points of each letter using the flags -p/--show-points. This option is disabled by default.

[!IMPORTANT] The subscript characters U+2080 to U+2089 are used to represent the digits from 0 to 9. The number 10 is represented using the U+2093 (Latin Subscript Small Letter X) to preserve equal spacing.

Make sure to use a font that support those characters, such as SF Mono on macOS.

Game timer

It is possible to show a timer during the play phase, once a draw have been accepted. To use the default timer duration of 5 minutes, simply use the -t/--timer flags without specifying a value:

scrabbler --timer

To change the duration, set the flag with a custom value:

scrabbler --timer=3m

[!NOTE] The duration value must be expressed as a stringified Go Duration, as defined by the documentation of the time.ParseDuration function.

Examples:

• 20 seconds: 20s
• 1 minute: 1m
• 3 minutes and 20 seconds: 3m20s

Letter distribution

Editions of the word board game Scrabble in different languages have differing letter distributions of the tiles, because the frequency of each letter of the alphabet is different for every language. As a general rule, the rarer the letter, the more points it is worth.

Most languages use sets of 100 tiles, since the original distribution of ninety-eight tiles was later augmented with two blank tiles.

—— Wikipedia

By default, if no distribution is chosen with a flag at startup, the application will display a selection menu.

You can change it with the -l/--distribution flags:

scrabbler --distribution=english

Below is the list of official distributions that are supported:

• afrikaans — Afrikaans
• bulgarian — Български
• czech — Čeština
• danish — Dansk
• dutch — Nederlands
• english — English
• estonian — Eesti
• finnish — suomi
• french — Français
• german — Deutsch
• greek — Ελληνικά
• icelandic — Íslenska
• indonesian — Bahasa Indonesia
• italian — Italiano
• latvian — Latviešu
• lithuanian — Lietuvių
• malay — Bahasa Melayu
• norwegian — Norsk
• polish — Polski
• portuguese — Português
• romanian — Română
• slovak — Slovenčina
• slovenian — Slovenščina
• swedish — Svenska
• ukrainian — Українська

Alternate distributions are also available:

• krafla: Alternate Icelandic distribution, sanctioned by Iceland's Scrabble clubs for their tournaments and for the national championship

[!NOTE] All information are compiled from the Scrabble letter distributions Wikipedia page.

See the distribution.go file, which define the letter distribution for each language.

[!IMPORTANT] Several editions such as Spanish, Catalan, Hungarian or Welsh (to cite a few) are not included because they use digraphs, which are challenging to deal with in a text-based UI.

They might be added in the future, once I have figured out an intuitive way to handle them.

Custom dictionary

By default, the application loads the official French Scrabble dictionary (ODS8), which is embedded into the binary with the Go embed package.

Alternatively, you can specify the path of a dictionary of your choice with the -d/--dictionary flags:

scrabbler --dictionary=dictionaries/english/twl06.txt.gz

A valid dictionary is a text file which contain one word per line (the words don't need to be sorted).

The file can optionally be gzipped (the file extension doesn't matter, the detection is header-based).

Browse the dictionaries directory, which already contains some official and non-official dictionaries for several languages:

Key bindings

• <kbd>Control+C</kbd> or <kbd>Escape</kbd>: Exit the application without confirmation
• <kbd>?</kbd>: Toggle help view (switch between short and extended)
• <kbd>Enter</kbd>: Validate selection or play word
• <kbd>←</kbd>/<kbd>y</kbd>: Select the yes option or move left in language selection menu
• <kbd>→</kbd>/<kbd>n</kbd>: Select the no option or move right in the language selection menu
• <kbd>↑</kbd>: Move up in the language selection menu
• <kbd>↓</kbd>: Move down in the language selection menu
• <kbd>Tab</kbd>: Toggle option selection
• <kbd>Control+R</kbd>: Full draw reset (put all tiles in bag and pick new ones)
• <kbd>Control+G</kbd>:
  • Press once to show word insights (whether one or more scrabble/bingo/bonus have been found with the tiles of the draw)
  • Press twice to show the words found

Credits

• 🧋 Bubbletea
• 👄 Lipgloss

License

The code is licensed under the MIT license. Read this or see the LICENSE file.