Multiplayer word grid game Server and Web Interface

Play a variety of SCRABBLE®-like games against the computer, or host your own web server to play games against friends and family.

Includes tile sets for many languages, and dictionaries in English, French, German, and Catalan, and it's easy to add more.

History

While there are a number of freely accessible servers out there offering clones of the classic SCRABBLE® game, I wanted a game I could host on my own server, and experiment with different dictionaries, board layouts, tile sets, and rule combinations. And I wanted it to be completely free. The public servers I found didn't work for me because:

• Their code is not public, and setting up your own server is not an option.
• They are generally limited to a single version of the game.
• Their (English) dictionaries are usually based on the standard American Scrabble Tournament dictionary, which is stuffed full of obscure words that only a dedicated aficionado would know. This makes their robot games inaccessible for casual players, as a computer player will beat them every time.
• They plague you with tedious advertisements and in-app purchases.

Enter Hans Hübner's html-scrabble, which this is a fork of. I started out working on their code but rapidly realised the scope and number of changes I intended required a fork, rather than bothering them with hundreds of pull requests.

This fork has some major differences:

• It has been entirely rewritten to use modern Javascript.
• The UI has been massaged to make it more mobile device friendly, and translated to several languages.
• It supports different board layouts and tile sets, and makes it easy to define your own.
• It reinstates some of Daniel Weck's dictionary support. Dictionaries have been moved server-side and made optional, and integrated into game play. New dictionaries are easy to generate from word lists.
• It supports logins, which helps you to set up tournaments and record long-term player performance.
• It adds a computer player, inspired by the work of Elijah Sawyers (which is in turn based on the work of Andrew W. Appel and Guy J. Jacobson). The player is stupid, simply selecting the highest scoring play it can in the time allowed for its move. However this is more than enough to beat most human players.
• You can optionally play against the clock.
• Players can use the dictionary to explore alternative moves (i.e. cheat).
• Adds a single-player version which runs entirely in the browser.
• It includes Scrabble tile sets for many different languages.

Installation

Single-player (runs in the browser)

If you want to play the single-player version against the computer, then all you have to do is to visit a server where it has been installed. Nothing is saved back to the server. Games are saved the the localStorage area in your browser which has a limited size, so don't get too carried away.

You can try it here.

Multi-player (client-server)

Using Docker

The simplest way to install the game on a server is to use the latest Docker image, which you can find on github. The Docker image takes care of all dependencies for you. Download the image and:

$ docker run -p 9093:9093 xanado

to run the server on port 9093 of the host machine.

npm

If you are familar with npm you can install the production version of Xanado directly:

$ npm install --global @warren-bank/scrabble

Once installed, run the server on the default port (9093):

$ scrabble

Developers

First use git clone to clone the repository to your local machine. Then in the root directory

$ npm install

to install the dependencies. There is developer documentation here.

Configuring the server

The default configuration is described here. You can override any of the configuration defaults using --config.

Once you are happy with the configuration, run the server using:

$ npm run server

You can then visit the games page at http://localhost:9093.

Playing with other people

If you want other internet users to access your game server, they have to be able to access a port on the server. If your server is already public on the internet that's no problem, but if it is hidden away on your local area network, you may need to make it visible. Fortunately that's fairly easy to do, and does not compromise security if it's done properly. This article describes how.

If you want the server to send out email invitations, you should refer to the nodemailer documentation for information on how to configure it.

Usage

The instructions are pretty much the same for both the single-player and the multi-player versions, except that you are always "signed in" on the single-player version.

Players start on the games page. This shows a leader board and a list of games. You can select "Show finished games" to view games that have ended.

When you click on a game, a dialog opens up showing a list of players in the game with their scores and whether they are currently connected or not. If you are signed in, you can join the game (or open a game you have previously joined), leave the game, add a robot, or delete it.

If you are signed in you can also create a new game. Normally one player will create a game, then other players sign in and join the game from the games page.

The game interface is fairly self explanatory if you know the rules of Scrabble.

When you create a game you can select the edition (the game board, rules, and tile set), the dictionary for checking words, and whether there is to be a time limit. You can also set a minimum number of players, or a maximum number of players who can join, and enable or disable some gameplay features.

Anyone signed in to a multi-player game can add or remove a robot player, or even delete the game, even if they are not a player. You can only have one robot in any one game, and you need at least one human player (otherwise, what's the point?)

When you add a robot to a game, you can optionally select a different dictionary that the robot will search to find plays. Limiting the robot to a smaller dictionary will give less challenging gameplay, but may be more suitable for less experienced players.

Single-player games always have a robot.

The installation comes with a number of 'editions' that emulate some commercially available games - SCRABBLE®, Super SCRABBLE®, Lexulous, and Words With Friends - all of which have very similar gameplay. And it's not too hard to create your own custom game, too.

Game play

The game user interface uses the mouse, or screen touches on mobile devices. Click the mouse on a letter in the rack and drag it to the board position where you want to drop it, or touch the tile you want to move, then touch where you want to place it.

You can also use the keyboard for rapid word entry.

• Click on any empty square on the board (or type *) and a "typing cursor" will appear, pointing right ⇒
• Click again (or hit the spacebar) and it will turn to point down ⇓
• Each letter from the rack that you type on the keyboard will be picked and placed, and the typing cursor moved right or down depending on the direction of the typing cursor.
• If you type a letter that isn't on the rack, but you have a blank tile, then the blank will be used for that letter.
• Use Backspace or Delete to put the letter behind the typing cursor back on the rack.
• When the typing cursor is displayed, you can also use the arrow keys to move it around the board.
• You can still use the mouse while the typing cursor is visible.

There are also a number of other keyboard shortcuts:

• The End or Enter keys will make the current move.
• The Home key will take back placed tiles.
• # will shuffle the rack.
• ? will pass the current turn.
• ! will take back your last move, or challenge the last player's move, depending on what the log says.
• ; will let you type into the chat window

Learning (and Cheating)

To abet the aspiring logodaedalus, there are some special 'chat' messages that can be entered.

• hint tells you the highest scoring play the computer can find for you, before your play.
• advise will turn on/off post-play analysis. This will suggest an alternative, higher-scoring play, if one exists, that you could have played.
• allow <word> adds <word> to the dictionary. The new word will not be written back to the dictionary database, so will be lost when the server is restarted. If you want to keep the word forever, see Whitelists.

Note that these only work in games for which a dictionary has been selected. To discourage cheating, everyone in the game is told when you use one of these special messages.

Editions

The /editions directory contains the files that are used to specify the games that can be played. Each specification is made up from:

• A board layout, giving the size of the board and the locations of double, triple and quadruple word scores
• A tile set, which lists the legal letters and the number of tiles of each letter
• A rack size, and the number of tiles you can swap
• Bonuses to be given for long words

The following editions are included:

• Scrabble, with tile sets for many languages
• English SuperScrabble (21x21 board)
• English Words with Friends
• English Lexulous

Dictionaries

The /dictionaries directory contains all the dictionaries. Included with the installation are a number of pre-built dictionaries:

• CSW2019_English - 280K words from the Collins Scrabble Words 2019 dictionary
• SOWPODS_English - 409K words from an unofficial version of the standard European English SCRABBLE® competition dictionary.
• German - 404k word list from the germandict project on Sourceforge.
• British_English - a custom 68k word British English dictionary, designed for casual players, to reflect the average vocabulary of a university-educated Briton. Note that many American spellings are also included, to reflect the flexible nature of our shared language.
• ODS8_French - 411k word French SCRABBLE® competition dictionary.
• Oxford_5000 - 29K English words derived from the Oxford Learner's Dictionary
• DISC_Catalan - 580k word Catalan.

Whitelists

Regenerating a dictionary can be time consuming, so dictionaries can be extended "on the fly" using a simple list of words in a file alongside the dictionary file, with the same name but the extension .white. For example, Oxford_5000.white. The file will be read each time the server is restarted. allow builds a whitelist, but it doesn't write it to a file - that's up to you.

Server Security

The assumption is that you will be running the multi-player game server on a private server with a limited, trustworthy audience.

The server can be configured to use HTTPS, see configuration for how. HTTPS is required for social media logins and notifications to work, and is highly recommended when using default logins. To use HTTPS you require an SSL certificate. See https://linuxize.com/post/creating-a-self-signed-ssl-certificate/ for instructions.

Development

The server code is written in Javascript ES6 and tested using node.js version 12.0.0. It may work in earlier versions of node.js, but is untested. The client is also written in Javascript and works in all the browsers I tested (Chrome, Firefox, Android, Opera.) Apple products - iOS, Safari, MacOS - are NOT tested.

Further development is welcome, especially:

• User interface translations
• Security
• Dictionaries and tile sets for new languages
• Keeping dependencies up to date See DEVELOPING for more.

IMPORTANT NOTICES

• SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, U.K., a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. If you don't already own a SCRABBLE board, buy one today!
• There is an official computer version of SCRABBLE® published by Ubisoft.
• "Words With Friends" is the name of an online game produced by Zynga Inc. To the best of our knowledge this is not a registered trademark.
• "Lexulous" is the name of an online game hosted at http://lexulous.com. To the best of our knowledge this is not a registered trademark.

This not-for-profit project is not associated with any of the owners of the aforementioned brands.

Privacy

Xanado is hosted on your own server and doesn't store any information about you anywhere else. The standalone version hosted on github doesn't store any information either. If you suspect otherwise, please get in touch because that would be a bug!

CODE COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

The current code was written by Crawford Currie and is Copyright © 2021-2022 Xanado Project. However it is built on the work of many people, most notably Hans Hübner, Daniel Weck, Elijah Sawyers, Andrew Appel, Guy Jacobsen, and Joshua Lewis, and the many people who they in turn based their work on. All these individuals are acknowledged as sharing the copyright to parts of the work.

The code is licensed under the terms of the MIT license, as the most restrictive of the licenses of the contributory works.