Excelsior

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Instructions

At the start of a game, 18 beads are dropped into the indents on the board. They will be randomly organized but none of them will form words and there will always be a vacant indent in the board's center.

Every two beads is marked with a letter from the word excelsior. Thus, there will always be two Xs, Cs, Ls, Is, Os, Ss, and Rs and four Es at the player's disposal. These beads cannot be removed from the board. What the player can do is move them in and out of the sole vacant spot the same way kings move in chess. Each bead can be moved one space vertically, horizontally, or diagonally.

The goal is to move and arrange these beads in a way so their letters all form valid words. When a bead is a part of a valid word, its letter will become bold and glow orangish-yellow.

Words are formed from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Valid words are determined using Scrabble rules. For a word to be valid it must be a minimum of four letters long, and it must not be a proper noun or a non-English word which hasn't been adopted into the mainstream vernacular.

Words are allowed to branch off other words and overlap words as long as their writing direction is maintained. They can even zig-zag across the board as long as their bends are orthogonal and only go down or right. Words do not count as valid if they are written backwards or it they bend in other directions.

EXAMPLE:

. C .<br>. O I .<br>I S L E .<br>S . . .<br>. . .

Valid words: ISLE, COSS, and COIL

. . .<br>L O O C<br>. . R I .<br>S C E .<br>. . .

Valid words: None

Because of this rule, some words are worth more than others. For example, the word EXCELSIOR is worth 24 points because it is also excel, excels, and cel. A valid word's point value is determined by the number of letters it contains.

CELS (4 points) + EXCEL (5 points) + EXCELS (6 points) + EXCELSIOR (9 points) = 24 points

Your current score is determined by the board's current point value—the sum of all its valid words' letters—divided by the amount of turns it took to get there, much like a baseball batting average, multiplied by a thousand with the mantissa rounded off. This score improves the faster large clusters of words are built and it dwindle with each turn spent.

When the board is completed, you will be rated with letters from the word excelsior and a letter will appear for each hundred points scored.

Acknowledgements

Inspired by the SATOR square, Sam Loyd's Fore and Aft puzzle, those sliding-tile word games Roalex made in the 1950s, and the word excelsior itself.

The internal dictionary used to determine valid words was filtered by hand, using regular expressions in Vim on Peter Norvig's ENABLE1.txt word list—which is in the public domain.

The code was typed in Vim and the graphics were made in GIMP, and the background image was cropped from a photo I took using my smartphone's camera.

No part of this game was made using AI or AI-based tools.

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Rating: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Your final score is 0 which was achieved in 0 moves.

Your previous highest recorded score is 0 .

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