Hexagonal
A word-search game in the style of Spelling Bee/Bonza: drag across a hexagonal letter grid to spell words from that day's word list.
Playing
Click and drag from tile to tile — each tile you drag across must be adjacent to the last, and letters are read off in the order you cross them. Release on the last tile of a valid word to submit it; releasing anywhere else cancels the selection. If the submitted word isn't on the list, it's rejected with a red flash. Words you've already found are tracked in the sidebar, grouped by length by default (toggle to a flat alphabetical list if you prefer).
Status
This is an early-stage prototype. The board and word list for each day are pre-generated — deterministically seeded by that calendar date (Mountain Time) — by a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/generate-puzzles.yml, running scripts/generatePuzzles.ts) and committed as static JSON under public/puzzles/YYYY-MM-DD.json; the client fetches the current day's file rather than generating anything itself, so once a day's puzzle has been served to any player, an app redeploy can never change it out from under them. Board construction uses constructive backtracking placement: words are placed one at a time along weighted-random adjacent-tile paths across the (partially filled) board, undoing and retrying when a placement leads to a dead end, until every tile is covered by at least one placed word. The dictionary is filtered for offensive words before it's ever bundled (SCOWL's profanity/slur tags, the LDNOOBW blocklist, and a hand-maintained blacklist/whitelist — see scripts/generateWordLists.py). If an offensive word still slips through, npm run puzzles:remove-word -- <word> retroactively scrubs it from every already-committed puzzle file (without touching the board or any other word) and adds it to the blacklist so it's never planted again.
Development
Requires Node.js. Install dependencies, then:
npm install
npm run dev # start the dev server at http://localhost:5173
npm run build # production build
npm run preview # preview a production build
npm run check # typecheck (svelte-check + tsc) — no linter configured yet
npm run test # Vitest — currently covers just the board-construction algorithm
npm run bench # Vitest benchmarks for the board-construction algorithm
dev/build/check each regenerate the word list from SCOWL first; the first run needs network access and make, and takes roughly a minute (cached after that). npm run dev additionally generates today's and tomorrow's puzzle files locally if they're not already present, so there's nothing to fetch a 404 on — build/check don't, since they're also what CI runs, and CI must never silently generate a puzzle a scheduled workflow run happened to miss.
Built with Svelte 5 (runes), TypeScript, and Vite.
prototypes/ holds standalone HTML/CSS experiments from before the Svelte app existed — not part of the build.
