isc.ro is one of the most old school, classic, and beloved Scrabble servers, but its implementation is really outdated and has some notable vulnerabilities/bugs. For example, the rack tiles seem to be randomly generated on the clientside, and passwords are plaintext. For a modern alternative, woogles.io is much nicer.
The board looks like a regular scrabble board, but the special squares are indicated only with colours, and don't say 'Triple Word Score' etc. like on the real Scrabble board. When you hover over a square, you see the bonus as '2x letter' etc.
This behaviour is fine for experienced players, but not for children or beginners, especially those playing on iPads, which don't have 'hover'.
Even if you don't play often, his scrabble videos are fantastic to watch on a lunch break.
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My friends and I are playing around with vibe coding a 4+ multi player scrabble, surprisingly it doesn't really exist. (hasbro is extremely tight on their copyright)
CamperBob2 · 6h ago
Don't do what I just did, and waste several minutes on a puzzle. As soon as you hit "Give up," or presumably submit the valid answer, all it does is say "auth-methods-failed."
macqm · 5h ago
Poland has kurnik.pl (meaning “chicken coop”) with a version of scrabble called “Literaki”. It’s been around for years.
nathell · 3h ago
It actually predates ISC, dating back to 2001. These days you can play actual Scrabble on Kurnik, too!
ISC also supports Polish (with OSPS).
maest · 9h ago
.ro is the Romanian TLD, which explains why "Romana" is one of the language options (Although it's not using the correct diacritics)
przemub · 6h ago
In 2002 diacritics were such a pain, or impossibility even :)
chrisweekly · 7h ago
I lost too much time having fun playing Wordfeud on iOS, had to go cold turkey and uninstall it. (No idea how they dodged the copyright issues, it seems like straight-up scrabble to me...)
crote · 2h ago
> No idea how they dodged the copyright issues
There's no copyright on game mechanics, if I understand correctly. You can protect stuff like the game's name, the artwork, unique characters, and the text in the rulebook - but not the purely mechanical rules themselves.
AStonesThrow · 2h ago
I seem to recall that Scrabble's board layout could be an issue. The specific placement of double/triple word/letter squares is not merely an important game mechanic, but also a distinctive feature of the brand. There's also the question of letter-tile point-values, and whether those specific points could be copied verbatim.
Source: I played a MUSH where players managed to reproduce games like Boggle and Scrabble for the amusement of other MUSHers
Aeroi · 9h ago
kind of dope, whats your stack/how'd you build it?
aw1621107 · 9h ago
"isc" -> Internet Scrabble Club, for those of us who didn't know
For anyone looking to practice, I've made two daily games featuring similar concepts:
https://clickword.org - use tiles to form words, placed words disappear, get as many points as possible.
https://spaceword.org - build a valid word grid using as little space as possible
Also, for convenience: https://woogles.io
The board looks like a regular scrabble board, but the special squares are indicated only with colours, and don't say 'Triple Word Score' etc. like on the real Scrabble board. When you hover over a square, you see the bonus as '2x letter' etc.
This behaviour is fine for experienced players, but not for children or beginners, especially those playing on iPads, which don't have 'hover'.
I made a userscript to fix this:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/508773-woogles-bonus-label...
Everyone should follow Will Anderson, he runs an extremely high quality Youtube channel -> https://www.youtube.com/@wanderer15
Even if you don't play often, his scrabble videos are fantastic to watch on a lunch break.
---
My friends and I are playing around with vibe coding a 4+ multi player scrabble, surprisingly it doesn't really exist. (hasbro is extremely tight on their copyright)
ISC also supports Polish (with OSPS).
There's no copyright on game mechanics, if I understand correctly. You can protect stuff like the game's name, the artwork, unique characters, and the text in the rulebook - but not the purely mechanical rules themselves.
Source: I played a MUSH where players managed to reproduce games like Boggle and Scrabble for the amusement of other MUSHers