I've liked word games for as long as I can remember. My mom was adept at crossword puzzles, and she introduced us to classics like Scrabble and Boggle. It's still a family joke that she only won at Scrabble because she played "crossword-puzzle words"—crazy words that we had never heard of, and that we challenged, but that were always in the dictionary! As my vocabulary improved and I got better at Scrabble, I noticed a few quirks in the gameplay that occur with some regularity:

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