peer2peergames

Crosstiles

Two to four players, a hundred tiles, and a board fifteen squares on a side. Lay words across and down so they cross what is already there, and the tiles still on your rack when somebody goes out come off your score.

Play Crosstiles Leaderboard

The rules

  1. Everybody draws seven tiles. The first move covers the middle square and puts down at least two tiles; every move after that touches at least one tile already on the board.
  2. The tiles you place in one turn all go in a single row or a single column, with no gap between them, though they may run through tiles the board already holds.
  3. Every run of two letters or more that your move makes, reading across and reading down, has to be a word. A move laid alongside an existing word usually makes several at once, and all of them count.
  4. A word is a word if it is in the site's list. There is no challenge and no appeal: the list is the referee, and it is named below.
  5. Instead of placing tiles you may exchange any number of them, which needs at least seven tiles left in the bag, or pass. Either way your turn ends and you score nothing.
  6. The two blanks can stand for any letter. You say which when you place one, it stays that letter for the rest of the game, and it is worth nothing wherever it sits.

Scoring

  1. Each tile is worth what is printed on it. Add up every word your move made and that is your score for the turn.
  2. A double or triple letter square multiplies that one tile. A double or triple word square multiplies the whole word it is in, and two word squares in the same word multiply together rather than adding.
  3. A premium square only counts on the turn the tile lands on it. Play through a word that is already there and its squares are spent.
  4. Putting down all seven tiles in one turn is worth 50 on top of the word itself. The 50 is added after the word has been multiplied, not before.
  5. The middle square doubles the first word of the game.

How a game ends

  1. The game ends when somebody plays their last tile and the bag is empty, or when six turns in a row have scored nothing, whichever comes first.
  2. Everybody then loses the value of the tiles still on their rack. If somebody went out, they gain the total of everybody else's, so the endgame swings games that looked settled.
  3. A blank left on your rack costs you nothing, which is why holding one to the end is a real decision rather than an obvious mistake.
  4. Every move has a deadline, chosen when the game is made, and it runs from a minute a turn to a week. Missing it passes your turn rather than ending the game, which matters most at the longer limits: one missed week should not end a game two people are enjoying. Three of your own turns missed in a row and you are out.

The word list

  1. The list is ENABLE with British spellings added from SCOWL: 185,276 words of two to sixteen letters, no names and no short abbreviations.
  2. IT IS ENGLISH, whatever language the rest of this site is showing you. That is a rule of the game here rather than a gap in the translation: a word list is content and not wording, and translating one would make a different game.
  3. Two-letter words are in play and they matter more than they look: laying a word alongside another one makes a two-letter word down every column it touches, and that is where most of the points on a crowded board come from.
  4. The licences for both sources are at /static/lexicon/LICENCE-wordlists.txt, and exactly what went into the copy this site judges with is recorded at /static/lexicon/wordgrid.manifest.

Worth knowing before you start

  1. Keeping a mix of vowels and consonants is worth more than scoring four extra points this turn. A rack of seven consonants is a wasted turn whatever is on the board.
  2. The squares next to a triple word are the dangerous ones. Opening a lane to one usually hands it to whoever moves next.
  3. An S is worth one point and far more than that in practice, because it turns a word already on the board into a longer one and lets you build a second word alongside it in the same move.
  4. The bag holds 100 tiles: 98 letters and 2 blanks. When it is nearly empty you can work out what the others are holding, and at that point the endgame is arithmetic rather than luck.

The seed decides the order of the bag and is published when the game ends, so the whole game can be replayed from the log and checked. Nothing else is chance: the board is the same every time, the word list is fixed and public, and nobody sees another player's rack.

Crosstiles terms

A blank
One of the two tiles with no letter on it. You choose what it stands for when you place it, it never changes after that, and it scores nothing wherever it lands.
The rack
The seven tiles in front of you. It refills from the bag at the end of your turn for as long as there are tiles left.
A premium square
A coloured square that multiplies a letter or a whole word, and only on the turn a tile first covers it.
Going out
Playing your last tile when the bag is empty. It ends the game and hands you the value of what everybody else is still holding.
The full rack bonus
The 50 points for putting down all seven of your tiles in one turn.

Playing it here

  • Against a person or the bot. The bot needs no account and starts at once. To play a person, be rated and keep your games, you need an account: an email address and a password.
  • At your own pace. Every move has a deadline you both see, from one minute to a week. A game can take an evening or it can take a fortnight.
  • Nothing to buy and nothing to win. No stakes, no prizes, no boosts, no undo. The only thing on offer is a place on a leaderboard, and only if you want one.
  • Every game can be checked. Anything decided by chance comes from the game's seed, and the seed is published the moment the game ends, so any finished game can be replayed and verified by anyone. See fair play.