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.
Carry the caller's per-tier active-game caps and each game's kind on the
wire (Profile.game_limits + GameView.kind, additive FBS + gateway transcode
+ client codec, committed regen). The New Game screen counts the player's
active games per kind from the lobby and locks a capped start: an outline
button with a lock that opens a funnel modal instead of a game -- a sign-in
prompt for a guest, a "finish a current game first" notice for a signed-in
account (native Telegram popup, in-app modal elsewhere). The lock lifts via
the existing profile refetch after a guest->durable upgrade.
Remove the lobby's old at_game_limit New-Game tab disable + notice: the flag
(now the random-kind cap) conflicted with the per-kind lock -- it hid the
screen where the lock lives and wrongly blocked an unfulfilled kind. The New
Game tab is always enabled; the per-kind start lock is the only gate. The
at_game_limit wire field stays (unused by the client) for a later cleanup.
Tests: client lock logic + codec kind/game_limits roundtrip + gateway
transcode encode + native popup builders (unit); a mock e2e for the lock
badge and the modal.
The history header's export button now opens a chooser — Telegram's
native popup inside Telegram, the app's own modal elsewhere — offering
the GCG file and a new client-rendered PNG of the final position
(lib/gameimage, Canvas 2D, lazy dynamic import, zero dependencies):
light theme, classic A..O/1..15 axes, label-free premium fills, and a
fixed-typography per-seat scoresheet with GCG-style move coordinates,
multi-word sub-lines, endgame rack-settlement row, winner trophy and a
hostname + device-locale finish date footer; a long game stretches the
board, never the typography.
Delivery mirrors the GCG rules (Web Share with no blob fallback, else
download) except on Android Telegram/VK WebViews and the desktop VK
iframe, where a binary PNG has no clipboard-text fallback: those get a
preview modal with a long-press/right-click save hint and a copy-image
button where ClipboardItem exists.
Ilia Denisov