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.
Decide who moves first by the official rule: each seated player draws one
tile, the one closest to "A" leads (a blank beats every letter), ties
re-drawing until a single leader remains. Each draw uses honest per-draw
crypto/rand entropy (not the deterministic bag seed), so the recorded draw —
not a seed — is the only account of the outcome. The leader takes seat 0, so
the engine and journal replay are unchanged.
The draw is recorded with the game (game_setup_draws, migration 00013) for
future tournaments, designed as a discrete "player N draws a tile" step.
Friend/AI games draw at creation. Auto-match draws when the game opens,
against a synthetic uuid.Nil opponent whose draw rows (NULL account_id) are
back-filled to the real opponent on join — so the opener's seat is fixed up
front and the existing open-game pre-move is preserved with no reseating.
Admin /_gm/games/:id gains the recorded draw list and a simple step-by-step
board replay (game.ReplayTimeline + a vanilla-JS stepper): a board with
A-O/1-15 headers and highlighted premium squares, placed letters with their
tile value as a subscript, rack panels around the board (seat 0 top, 1
bottom, 2 left, 3 right) with the current player highlighted, and a per-move
log with the tiles drawn and the bag remainder.
Docs: ARCHITECTURE §6/§9, FUNCTIONAL (+_ru), PRERELEASE (FM row), design spec.
Ilia Denisov