Composing an already-played word read as a perfectly legal move: the tiles
drew as legal, the caption showed "БРА = 6" and the ✅ was enabled, and
only the server refused the play with the bare "illegal move" toast.
The on-device evaluator already applied the rule, but it reported the
refusal as a plain illegal play, so nothing distinguished a repeated word
from a misspelling and the caption fell back to the turn label. It now
names the word it rejected, and the game screen reads
"БРА: уже использовано" above the scores while the tiles stay marked
invalid — the composition is wrong, but for a reason the player cannot
read off the board, since the word itself is in the dictionary. The
verdict is reached on the device before the play is ever offered to the
server, in an online game exactly as in an offline one; the offline
source reports the same reason through the same field.
Only the main word is ever refused: a cross-word the game has already
used still stands (it is incidental to laying the main word) and merely
scores nothing, so the rule cannot falsely block a play in a game with
several words per turn.
The scoring of such a play is now pinned to the point on both sides: the
engine test and the client test evaluate the same position — РОТ laid
across a standing КО, completing an already-played КОТ — and assert the
same totals (10 unrestricted, 5 with the rule), so a divergence between
the two engines breaks one of them. The client test also replays the
exact test-contour position this was reported from.
Russian "Эрудит" treats a word laid on the board as belonging to the
game: it cannot be laid again. Neither the solver, the backend nor the
offline JS port knew the rule, so a player (and the robot) could replay a
word freely. Official Scrabble places no such restriction, so both
Scrabble variants keep playing unrestricted.
The rule applies in two ways. A play whose main word is already on the
board is illegal, and is neither accepted nor generated. A play whose
perpendicular cross-word is already there stands — that word is
incidental to laying the main word — but scores nothing. The set of
played words is the game's own move journal, main words and cross-words
alike, compared decoded, so a word spelled with a blank is the same word.
It lives in the game layer, not the solver: only a game knows its
history, and the solver stays stateless and standard-rules. The backend
applies it at submit, at the move preview and over generated moves
(filtering and re-ranking them, so neither the robot nor the hint can
offer a play the engine would then refuse); the client port does the same
for the offline engine and for the on-device preview of an online game.
The rule is pinned per game (games.no_repeat_words, set from the variant
at creation) rather than keyed on the variant, because a game is replayed
from its journal on every open. Applied retroactively it would make an
already-played repeat illegal — closing that game as a draw — and would
rescore a play whose cross-word repeats an earlier word, shifting a live
game's totals. Games created before the rule keep playing without it. The
flag rides the wire as a trailing field because the client's preview must
score the way the server does, and offline games pin the same answer in
their own record.
Ilia Denisov