New Game's quick game gains an explicit opponent selector — 🤖 AI (default)
or 👤 Random player. AI starts a game seated with a pooled robot that joins
and moves at once: no per-move timeout (a 7-day inactivity loss reusing the
turn-timeout sweeper), chat/nudge disabled, no statistics, the opponent shown
as 🤖 everywhere. The random path (disguised robot) is unchanged.
Driven by one game flag (games.vs_ai), set only on AI-started games so the
disguised path is never revealed; Matchmaker.StartVsAI seats the robot
directly (no open pool); the robot replies event-driven via the game service's
after-commit/after-create hook. Wire: vs_ai on EnqueueRequest + GameView.
A single tile that only extended a word perpendicular to the client-declared
direction was rejected: the UI always sent dir=H for one-tile plays (the
dirOverride/Controls toggle was orphaned in the Stage 7 game rework), so placing
"А" above "БАК" to form "АБАК" failed the solver's main-word-length check even
though the word is in the dictionary.
Make the backend infer a play's orientation from the placed tiles and the board
(internal/engine.resolveDirection): two or more tiles by the line they share, a
lone tile by the axis it abuts (longer word wins, horizontal on a tie). Direction
becomes an output, not an input: drop dir from the SubmitPlay/Eval wire requests
and add it to EvalResult. Journal replay keeps trusting the stored "H"/"V"
(SubmitPlayDir) so a rebuilt game matches the one committed.
UI: stop computing/sending direction; the preview now shows the words a move
forms with its total score (game.previewWords); the make-move control is disabled
until the play is confirmed legal; the "your turn" label hides while tiles are
pending. Delete the orphaned Controls.svelte.
Regenerate the FlatBuffers bindings (Go + TS) and update the gateway transcode
and the loadtest edge client to the new contract. Bake the decision into
ARCHITECTURE.md (§5/§9.1), FUNCTIONAL.md (+ _ru) and the backend README.
Ilia Denisov