It doesn’t include slurs, uses US-spellings (at least in the US), and intentionally doesn’t include “obscure” words, though obviously that’s a judgement call. (Spelling Bee has an email link if you want to dispute an exclusion — I believe I helped get “ichor” added to the list.)

As for 'learning new words and their meanings', clearly Scrabble isn't that game. But to be fair that isn't its stated aim, either. If you know any good examples I'd love to play them.

My beef with Scrabble is that it really isn't a word game, so much as an exercise in memorizing arbitrary strings of symbols. It's unfortunate, because it doesn't really encourage people to develop their vocabulary, as in "learning new words and their meanings", which is generally useful. Rather, it encourages people to learn what arbitrary combinations are legal in a given word list.

Ad absurdum - at one point, the world Scrabble champion was a fellow who didn't actually speak English.

It's just the word layout that's automated. The word list (about 4k words) is entirely hand-curated. I had some tooling to make it easier, but every word was selected by me rather than automation. But obviously it's impossible for any single person to be propely calibrated, mistakes can happen, and I'm not a native speaker so there are some odd blind spots in my vocabulary.

"Bhaji" was a word I personally thought was fairly common. If I had to name three Indian dishes, it'd be one of the three. But it might be too regional; when it was brought up in a playtest group, a person from UK thought it was basically in daily use while continental Europeans insisted they had never heard of it. So it'll probably go the next time I revisit the word list.

Re: "breakfast test", I'd not heard it phrased that way before, but immediately know what you mean :) My intended policy was no slurs, genitals, or sexual violence, and no vulgar words for bodily functions or body parts. This doesn't match the classic exclusion list exactly, but is at least similar in spirit. I expected "teats" to be fine, since to my mind it's only used for animals and human constructs (like baby bottles), not humans. But removing borderline words is cheap, offending some players is expensive :)

Note that the game does make a distinction between words that are accepted and words that can appear in puzzles. I mostly move words from the latter to the former rather than remove them entirely, so if you go probing for controversial words, you might find a handful of other examples. But the intent is definitely for there to be a "voice" in the word selection, such that entire categories of words are predictably in or predictably out in a way that the player can get an intuition for.

I'll definitely make another pass once I've internalized the player expectations better.

If the NYT would release "The daily NYW word game" it would probably not catch on as much.

As for dictionaries, mobile phones and apps changed everything. However, before these 'advances' the dictionary to use was the correct Scrabble one.

What I liked about the proper Scrabble dictionary was that none of the words were explained. So you could play words beyond your normal level of spoken English without knowing what they meant, but you would know they were in the proper Scrabble dictionary. So you could have 'ax' and not know what it meant or extend it on the next go to 'axon' with no idea what that meant. You did know from previous games that this was legit and that was all that mattered.

To people not in the game this dictionary seemed absurd. The language had morphed into code. A code that you had to know if you were ever to have a chance of using complete 7 letter 'laydowns' several times in a game and do those cool two letter joins to make such things possible.

These word games are for casual fun and enjoyment.

It's really not a big deal whether a particular word is included or not in the dictionary for a particular game. For Spelling Bee, the levels appear to be calculated based on the word list, so while it may be a little frustrating that a particular real (albeit off-colored, so to speak) word isn't accepted, rest assured that that doesn't doesn't affect the puzzle's difficulty. So no harm done. IMO, if some particular word removes more fun than it adds, good riddance.

Personally, I was most offended when "ichor" was not accepted, though I'm happy to say their reporting mechanism seemed to work, because it seems to be accepted now at least in the pangram game.

An exception is made for “qi”, just because. Mine is not to question why, simply to regularly lose.

We ended up giving the lower difficulty levels a restricted dictionary anyway, but this was to affect players' perception of the difficulty rather than the actual difficulty (the AI on "beginner" mode shouldn't be playing a lot of words you've never heard of). We adjusted time budgets so that difficulty still ramped up as the dictionary expanded at higher levels.

But also I stopped playing because it wasn't fun anymore.

1. The board often becomes cramped—especially in its bottom right quadrant. This is understandable, because valid words must go from right to left or top to bottom, but I began to wonder if there was some way to fix this.

2. It's not uncommon to get stuck with all vowels or consonants. This is particularly painful because your only recourse is to exchange letters and forfeit a turn. I found myself wishing there were different options for exchanging letters, and I wondered if there was a way to never get stuck with all vowels or consonants in the first place.

3. The same small words appear in almost every game. This is due in part to the fact that you draw from a fixed set of letters in every game. For example, there's only one J, Q, X, and Z, and there are only two blanks, so it's impossible for the words PIZZA and JAZZ to ever be played in the same game—the letter Z can appear at most three times in a game. Another reason for the lack of word variety stems from the fact that each player only has 7 letters to work with. There are approximately 56,000 valid words composed of 2-7 letters. I know this because I've paid for a license of the 2020 edition of the North American Scrabble Players Association dictionary. In contrast there are about 87,000 words composed of 8-10 letters, so having 10 letters at your disposal would more than double the number of potential words you could play!

I remember being pretty excited when I first heard about Words With Friends. It had a lot of hype, and I was hopeful that it had solved some of the quirks of Scrabble. I was disappointed to discover that it was basically just a clone. Yes, the squares on the board had been shuffled around, and some letters were worth more or fewer points, but there was basically zero innovation. The board still gets cramped, you still get stuck with all vowels or consonants, and your vocabulary is still limited. At some point I decided I'd had enough, and I set out to solve these problems with my own word game.

Wordit is the result of this effort.

Wordit combines the gameplay of traditional word games with a deck of cards that help you make every turn count. I think of it like a cross between Scrabble and Magic: The Gathering. Wordit has rules of course, and they're familiar to anyone who has played Scrabble or Words With Friends, but the cards in Wordit allow you to bend just about every one of those rules. You can play a word that is not connected to other words. You can exchange letters in various ways without forfeiting a turn. You can play a word that's horizontally or vertically backwards. You can even play defensively by removing a square from the board or reducing your opponent's best letter to 1 point.

If you like word games, please give Wordit a try, and feel free to start a game with me (my display name is Rob). Note that Wordit is a progressive web app, so you can play it right in your browser (and you can "install" it on mobile or desktop for a more native feel).

I'm open to any and all feedback!

Thanks, Rob

You're right about the dictionary, actually the whole time I kept wondering about how annoying it must have been to choose a dictionary for this game. Even though not accidentally making non-obscure words without noticing is part of the challenge, accidentally making obscure words is annoying!

Maybe I just don't know enough words - but looking through my game log, I was annoyed by "cony", "smit", "huic", "yipe", "nome", "torii", "agon", "mairs", "imido" and "sial", some of which don't display a definition when you click them, but all of which appear in all the scrabble dictionaries referenced on the website you just linked. Meanwhile I was sad to discover vape is so far only in one scrabble dictionary :) And annoyed to discover "oxalic", which is also in all the dictionaries on that site, was not accepted.

I guess there's a spectrum between "advanced scrabble player level vocabulary" and "fun word game", because I imagine (and suspect you have probably had feedback along these lines) _not_ allowing a word which is obscure but still unambiguously used in the modern era would be worse UX overall - the sort that's more likely to make you rage-quit.

I can see why you'd try to get a bit of wordle-esque shareability out of the daily mode even though I like the classic mode more myself. But I think the tutorial popup isn't as comprehensive as it needs to be for someone's first game to be fun. The first time I clicked the link I did an abysmal job at the daily challenge, I think it wasn't obvious that swaps didn't need to be neighbouring like the given example. Something that might be better is to make an interactive tutorial for first-time visitors - come up with a 5x5 board that is quickly solved and demonstrates several strategies and then walk the player through clearing it. I also think the help popup being one click away would be useful.

I would also have liked the help popup to let me know that progress is saved if you close the page, I ended up checking in an incognito window because I had no time to keep playing but wanted to come back and try to reach the target I'd set myself another time!

Anyway - criticism and suggestions aside - well done, it is a fun game and concept!