Once upon a time, there was Scrabble and we played word games.
Then Words with Friends introduced the asynchronous game, the one where you could brute force and try all kinds of combinations of words. Or, you know… just cheat and use a anagram tool to find possible matches. Soon, every game was filled with nonsense bingo entries worth 80+ points. Eventually I quit because it felt like I was playing against a computer, not a person.
Of course, that isn’t after I also used word solver apps to cheat as well. But then it was my computer against their computer. And that wasn’t fun.
Now there’s NYT Crossplay, which has brought all of these same issues back. And while I’ve made a commitment to not using apps like this, sometimes I’m so far behind I start hoping for a miracle…
But the word solver apps I found weren’t great. They often included words that didn’t count (pulling from the wrong dictionaries) or made it hard to identify the right patterns. Plus they weren’t always mobile friendly and made it hard to really find the best word options.
So here’s my own take on a Scrabble word finder type app: https://wordcheat.netlify.app/
Use at your own discretion and according to your own principles.