scrabble-game/docs/FUNCTIONAL.md

Scrabble Game — Functional spec

Per-domain user stories: what each user-visible operation does. This is the starting point for any change request that touches behaviour. The English version is authoritative; FUNCTIONAL_ru.md is a mirror for the project owner — mirror every point edit in the same patch (translate only the changed paragraphs).

Domains

Client app

The web/app client (Svelte + Vite) realizes these stories. It covers signing in (guest or email), the "my games" lobby, starting an auto-match, playing the board (place tiles by drag or tap, pass, exchange, resign), the top-1 hint, the unlimited word-check with complaint, per-game chat and nudge, real-time in-app updates, switching interface language (en/ru) and theme, and a read-only profile. It also handles managing friends (including one-time friend codes) and blocks, friend-game invitations, editing the profile and binding an email, the statistics screen, and the in-game history viewer with GCG export. Settings also pick the board's bonus-label style (beginner / classic / none). A hint lays the suggested tiles on the board for the player to confirm and costs nothing when the rack has no legal move. The word-check accepts only the variant's alphabet, remembers answers within the session and rate-limits repeats. A public landing page at the site root introduces the game, switches language and theme, and links to the matching per-language Telegram channel; the game itself runs at /app/ (web) and /telegram/ (the Telegram Mini App). The landing's theme is ephemeral (it follows the system scheme, not the saved preference); its language choice is saved.

Identity & sessions

A player arrives from a platform (Telegram first), via email login, or as an ephemeral guest. The gateway validates the credential once and mints a thin session token; the backend resolves it to an internal user_id. A Telegram Mini App launch authenticates from the platform's signed initData, themes the UI to the Telegram colours, and — on first contact — seeds the new account's interface language from the Telegram client. Telegram runs a single bot: every player uses the same bot, and all of its chat and out-of-app notifications are written in the player's own interface language (en/ru). A separate optional promo bot can run alongside the main one — its only job is to answer /start with a short message and a button that opens the main bot's app, where the player picks their game variant; it is an onboarding entry point that touches nothing else. Guests are session-only with restricted features (auto-match only; no friends, stats or history); an abandoned guest that never joined a game and has been idle past the retention window is garbage-collected. While the app is open the client keeps a live stream and receives in-app updates in real time — the opponent's move, your turn, chat, nudges and an opponent joining a game you are waiting in. Each update lands as the event itself, applied in place with no reload, so the board refreshes seamlessly and an invited game opens instantly. When the app is closed, the chosen out-of-app events (your turn, game over, nudge, a found match, an invitation or friend request) arrive as a Telegram notification instead — unless the player keeps notifications in the app only (a profile setting, on by default). The "your turn" notification names the opponent and recaps their last move — the word and the running score for a scoring play, or that they swapped or passed — and a finished game sends a "game over" notification with your result and the final score (scores read with yours first). If the connection drops or the server is rate-limiting, the app does not nag with errors: the header shows a quiet "Connecting…" spinner while it reconnects, actions that send to the server pause until it is back (a server-data screen still opens, with the spinner, and fills in on reconnect), and pending reads resume on their own — the interface stays usable instead of flashing a red banner each time.

Accounts, linking & merge

First platform contact auto-provisions a durable account. From the profile a player links an email (via a confirm code) or their Telegram (via the web sign-in); a guest who links their first identity becomes a durable account. The "already taken" status of an identity is never revealed before the code/sign-in is verified. If the linked identity already belongs to another account, the player is shown an explicit, irreversible confirmation and the two accounts are merged into the one they are using (statistics summed, games and friends transferred, duplicates removed) — except when a guest links an identity that already has a durable account, where the durable account is kept and the guest's games move into it. A merge is blocked only while the two accounts share a game still in progress.

Lobby & matchmaking

On a cold open the lobby greets the player with a brief loading splash — Scrabble tiles spelling ЭРУДИТ / ЗАГРУЗКА / ОЖИДАНИЕ as a small crossword — that clears the moment the games list is ready, so the list never flashes an "empty" state on a slow connection.

The lobby lists my games and offers a bottom tab bar — new game, statistics, and a ⚙️ settings tab opening the settings hub (settings, profile, friends, about). The my games list groups games into three sections — your turn, opponent's turn and finished (empty sections are hidden) — and orders them so the games awaiting your move come first, the longest-waiting on top, while opponent-turn and finished games are most-recent first; within the your-turn and opponent-turn sections a game with any unread notification floats to the top (the finished section keeps its order). It renders as a compact, line-separated list. While the lobby is open and a listed game becomes your turn or finishes, its status icon blinks twice to draw the eye (an opponent's-turn change is silent, applied in place). You can remove a finished game from your own list: swipe a finished row left (or, on desktop, tap its ⋮) to reveal a ❌, then tap it. The removal is per-account and permanent — the game disappears only from your list and stays in the other players' lists, and there is no undo. A finished AI game (🤖) you left — by resigning or by letting it lapse to the 7-day timeout — drops from your finished list automatically, with no swipe needed; a normally finished AI game stays until you remove it, and no other game type is auto-removed. The game types offered on New Game are limited to the player's chosen variant preferences (see Profile & settings) — Erudite-first, defaulting to Erudite only. Variants are shown by their display name — both Scrabble variants read "Scrabble"/"Скрэббл" and Erudit reads "Erudite"/"Эрудит" (by the interface language), and the same name titles the in-game screen. This gates only starting a new game you initiate — auto-match, a vs-AI game and a friend invitation you create — so a player still sees and plays existing games of any variant, and being invited to a game lets you accept it in any variant.

Quick game lets you choose your opponent — an AI (the default) or a random player. With AI you start at once against a 🤖 that joins and replies immediately: there is no waiting, there is no chat or nudge — only the word-check tool — add-friend is never shown; instead of a per-move clock you lose only after 7 days without a move (so you can abandon an AI game freely, and the AI itself never runs out of time). Choosing a random player is auto-match (always 2 players), which drops you straight into the game and you wait inside it: if it is your turn you can already move, otherwise you watch your tiles. While no opponent has joined, the opponent card (and the game's row in the lobby) reads "searching for opponent", and resign, chat and nudge are unavailable. Another player searching the same variant and rule joins your game; failing that, a robot takes the empty seat after 1.5–3 minutes, so a game always starts — and the New Game screen notes you can close the app while you wait and come back later. For Russian games (auto-match or friend invitation), New Game also offers "Multiple words per turn" (default off): off plays the simplified single-word rule — only the word laid along the player's line must be a real word (and it must still cross or extend letters already on the board along that line), and any incidental perpendicular words are ignored and not scored — while on is standard Scrabble. English games are always standard and show no such toggle. In auto-match the choice joins the pairing key, so a player only meets opponents who picked the same rule. Friend games (2–4) are formed by inviting players from the friend list (an invitation, like a friend code, is shareable as a Telegram deep link that opens it directly): the inviter chooses the settings and the game starts once every invitee has accepted — any decline cancels it, and an unanswered invitation expires after seven days.

Simultaneous-game cap. A player may hold at most 10 active quick games at once — counting both in-progress and still-searching auto-match/AI games, but not friend games created by invitation. At the cap the New Game button is disabled (greyed) and a plain, low-emphasis line under the lists reads "You've reached the simultaneous games limit."; both clear automatically once an active game finishes and the count drops below ten. The cap blocks starting any game (a quick game or a friend invitation, which share the New Game entry), but accepting an incoming invitation is never blocked — so friend games are capped from the other end (you cannot initiate one while at the cap) while you can always join a game you are invited to.

Playing a game

Place tiles, pass, exchange, or resign. Pass and exchange share one control — choosing no tiles passes the turn, choosing tiles exchanges them. Tiles are laid without choosing a direction — the game infers the play's orientation, so a single tile that extends an existing word (down a column or across a row) is accepted. A play is validated against the game's dictionary at submit time and scored; an unlimited preview reports the word(s) a tentative move would form and its score, or that it is not legal, and the move is offered for submission only once it is confirmed legal. The dictionary check tool is unlimited and offers a complaint on any result; for a word it finds, it also links out to an external reference dictionary (gramota.ru for Russian games, scrabblewordfinder.org for English) to look it up. Hints are governed per game — whether they are allowed and how many each player starts with — and draw on a personal hint wallet once the per-game allowance is spent. The game ends when the bag empties and a player clears their rack, after 6 consecutive scoreless turns, by resignation, or by the per-game move timeout (5 minutes to 24 hours, default 24 hours): a missed turn auto-resigns, except while the player is inside their daily away window. In a two-player game a resignation or timeout gives the win to the other player and the leaver keeps their score. In a game with three or four players the leaver's seat is dropped and the others play on, the game ending when a single active player remains; the disposition of the leaver's tiles (returned to the bag or removed from play) is chosen when the game is created, and the leaver's rack is never shown to the others. A player's board composition is kept per game: the rack arrangement and the tiles laid but not yet submitted are saved as they compose and restored on return (including on another device); a player may arrange tiles during the opponent's turn, but that draft is position-only — the score preview and submission stay available only on the player's own turn.

Robot opponent

When auto-match finds no human within the wait window (1.5–3 minutes), a robot opponent takes the empty seat of the game you are already waiting in. It is meant to feel like a person: it decides once per game whether to play to win (about 40% of the time, so the human wins most games), aims for a close score rather than crushing or throwing the game, now and then plays a single move against that plan — a surprise lead or a slack move — yet holds to the plan once the bag empties, and plays at a human pace — short thinking times for most moves, the occasional long one, and a night-time pause that tracks the player's own day; once a game is clearly decided and both sides are only passing, it stops dragging it out, answering its forced passes at roughly the player's own pace rather than after a long deliberation. It answers a nudge within a few minutes and, when the player keeps it waiting, nudges back on a sparse schedule — roughly every 9-12 hours, and never during its night-time pause. It carries a human-like, language-appropriate name — a fresh one each game, drawn from a wide international pool of real names and handles, so the arena feels populated by many different players (a Russian game shows mostly Russian names, never East-Asian scripts; an international game the full mix); it does not chat, and silently ignores friend requests — a request to a robot stays pending and expires, exactly like a human who never responds.

The same robot also backs the honest-AI quick game the player chooses directly (above). There it makes no pretence: it is shown as 🤖 everywhere, joins and moves at once (no thinking time or night pause), keeps the same strength (it still plays to win only about 40% of the time, with the same occasional move against its plan that fades out by the endgame), and chat, nudge and add-friend are off. AI games are practice — they never count toward a player's statistics.

Social: friends, block, chat, nudge

Become friends in two ways: redeem a one-time code the other player issues (six digits, valid for twelve hours), or send a request to someone you have played with — they accept, ignore it (a request lapses after thirty days and can then be re-sent), or decline (a decline blocks further requests from you until they hand you a code). Cancelling your own pending request withdraws it; unfriending removes the friendship. In a game, each opponent's score card (while the move history is open) carries two controls: an add-to-friends 🤝 on the right and a block ✖️ on the left. Each confirms with a tap on a fading ✅ — the card reads Add friend? (or Block?, in red) in place of the score while confirming — and while one is confirming the other is hidden so they never overlap. The 🤝 goes disabled while a request is pending or was declined and disappears once you are friends; both controls disappear and the opponent's name is struck through once you have blocked them. They update in place the moment the relationship changes and stay correct across reloads. Applying a block (or friend request) takes effect immediately and is confirmed by a live event; a transport failure rolls the control back to its prior state.

Block globally — switch off incoming chat and/or friend requests — or block an individual player. A per-user block is one-directional and silent: you stop receiving everything from that person — chat, nudges, friend requests and game invitations — and the matchmaker never pairs you with them, while they notice nothing. Their messages and nudges still send by the normal rules but never reach you (anything that would show as unread for you is marked read at once), and a friend request or invitation they send you is kept but never surfaces. A block overrides but does not delete an existing friendship (so you may block a friend, and they keep seeing you as one); active games are never interrupted — you can finish them, with the blocked opponent's chat composer hidden (only the log remains). Blocking from a game card mirrors the block in Settings → Friends; unblock and unfriend live there only. Blocking an auto-match opponent who is secretly a robot behaves the same in that game (struck name, hidden composer) and lists the blocked opponent under the name you saw, but is recorded only against that game — the disguise holds, the shared robot is never globally blocked, and the matchmaker keeps pairing you with robots (so you can never block yourself out of opponents). Sending the 🤝 to such a disguised robot likewise records the request only against that game (pinned to the seat, so it stays sent there without touching that robot in your other games); the robot ignores it, the request never appears in Settings → Friends, and it drops automatically about a week after the game ends. Per-game chat is for quick reactions: messages are short (up to 60 characters) and may not contain links, email addresses or phone numbers, even disguised. You may send one message per turn, on your own turn; once it is sent the field gives way to a short caption until your next turn. Nudge the player whose turn is awaited at most once per hour (the nudge is part of the game chat); both the in-app toast and the out-of-app push (delivered via the platform) name the nudger (": waiting for your move"). Chat and the word-check tool share one comms screen with 💬 chat / 🔎 dictionary tabs, reached from the 💬 in the move-history header (with a back to the game). An AI game has no chat, so its comms screen is the word-check alone — and once an AI game is finished (no chat, the dictionary closed) the 💬 entry disappears entirely. An unread chat entry — a message or a nudge from an opponent — raises a small dot next to the game in the lobby and on the game's score bar, red when an unread message is waiting and a softer amber when only nudges are. Opening the move history counts as reading the chat, even without entering it: the dot clears and the 💬 icon fade-blinks twice. A nudge also clears the moment its recipient takes their move.

Profile & settings

Edit the display name (letters joined by a single space / "." / "" separator, with an optional trailing "." or a trailing run of up to five digits, up to 32 characters and at most 5 special characters — the "." / "" punctuation, spaces and digits aside), the timezone (chosen as a UTC offset), the daily away window (on a 10-minute grid, at most 12 hours, wrapping midnight) and the block toggles. The profile form is edited inline (no separate edit mode). Linking an email or Telegram and merging accounts are covered under "Accounts, linking & merge".

Preferences (which variants you can be matched into). A profile setting picks the game variants — Erudite, Russian Scrabble and English Scrabble, shown Erudite-first — you allow yourself to be matched into; a new account starts with Erudite only, and you must keep at least one selected. This list is exactly what New Game offers when you start a game (auto-match, an AI game, or a friend invitation you create) — a variant you have not enabled is not offered, and the server refuses it. It does not restrict games you are invited to: an invited friend may accept an invitation in any variant, and you can always open and play existing games of any variant.

Feedback

A registered player reaches the operators from Settings → Info: a Feedback screen with a message (up to 1024 characters) and an optional single attachment (one file, up to ~1 MB — images, PDF, text/log, office documents, RTF or archives; an unsupported file is refused on the form without naming the allowed types). After sending, the form clears and confirms "Ваше сообщение отправлено", and sending is blocked until the operator has dealt with that message — on re-entry the screen reads "Ожидаем рассмотрения вашего последнего обращения". The operator's reply appears below the form as "Ответ на ваше последнее сообщение" (any link in it opens in a new tab); it is marked read once the screen shows it and disappears a week later. A badge on the Settings tab (and on Info inside it) flags an unanswered reply. Guests cannot send feedback (the entry is hidden). A player the operator has barred from feedback (a role, not a full account block) sees the send control disabled.

History & statistics

Finished games are archived in a dictionary-independent form and exportable to GCG; the export is offered only once a game is finished, and never for an honest-AI practice game (a live game's export would leak the move journal; an AI game is throwaway). The client shares the .gcg file where the platform supports it, otherwise downloads it. Statistics (durable accounts only): wins, losses, draws, max points in a game, and max points for a single move (the best play, which already includes every word it formed plus the all-tiles bonus). It also shows the player's move count (their plays — passes and exchanges do not count) and their hint share (the percentage of those plays where a hint was taken). The best move is also broken down per game variant, showing the word itself drawn as game tiles (a wildcard shows its letter but no value) — one row per variant the player has played, omitting variants with no plays. A game that can no longer be continued — because a rule changed and an earlier move would now be illegal — is closed as a draw the moment someone opens it, never left stuck on an error: the move history shows an impersonal organizer note at its end (the game could not be continued), and the same note rides the GCG export.

Administration

Operators reach a server-rendered admin console at ${DOMAIN}/_gm — the backend renders it; the gateway gates it with HTTP Basic Auth on its public listener and proxies it verbatim. The console lists and inspects users (profile, statistics, identities, their games) and games — summary, seats, the recorded first-move tile draw (who drew what, deciding who leads), and a simple step-by-step board replay of the whole game — works the word-complaint review queue — resolving each as reject / accept-add / accept-remove — and exposes the dictionary: the active version new games pin, the resident versions per variant, an online dictionary update (upload the scrabble-dawg-vX.Y.Z.tar.gz release archive, preview the words added and removed per variant against the active dictionary, then install — which writes the version, loads it and makes it active; versions are immutable and games in progress keep their own), and the pending wordlist changes derived from accepted complaints (which feed the offline rebuild and are marked applied after an update). When the Telegram bot channel is configured an operator can also message a user (by their Telegram identity) or post to the game channel. State-changing actions are protected by a same-origin check; the console tracks no operator identity.

The console also surfaces rate-limit abuse: a Throttled page lists the recently throttled users/IPs the gateway reported (an in-memory window — it resets on a backend restart) and the accounts currently carrying the soft high-rate flag. An account sustaining rejections past a tunable threshold is flagged automatically — the marker is reversible, shown as a badge in the user list and on the user card, and never blocks play; the operator reviews and clears it from the user card. The account flag itself is never a ban. In production the same page also lists the active IP bans the gateway is enforcing: a temporary block of a client IP that floods the service past a threshold, or trips a hidden honeypot path or a planted honeytoken — a high-confidence sign of a scanner or hostile bot, never a normal player. Each ban shows its reason and expiry with an Unban action; bans auto-expire and the operator can lift one early. IP bans are a production-only safeguard — the shared test environment cannot tell its clients apart, so it does not enforce them.

The console also lets an operator manually block an account — the hard counterpart to the soft high-rate flag. From the user card the operator blocks the account permanently or until a date (presets: 1 day / 3 days / 1 week / 1 month, or a custom date in UTC), optionally citing a reason chosen from an editable en+ru picklist managed on a Reasons page; the blocked player sees the reason in their own language. Blocking instantly forfeits the player's active games (each opponent wins, as if the player resigned) and removes them from matchmaking. A blocked player — on opening the app or on any action — is shown a terminal screen: "Your account is blocked" (permanent) or "…blocked until <date, time>" (temporary, in their timezone), plus the reason when one was given, and the app stops all background traffic with the server. A temporary block lifts itself when it expires; the operator can also unblock from the user card at any time (games already lost stay lost).

Where the bot manages a channel's linked discussion chat, only a registered player who is not blocked may write there: the bot grants the right to write when such a player joins, while an unregistered or blocked one stays muted (the promo bot points newcomers at the game so they register). An operator can also mute a player in the chat only — a chat_muted role on the user card — without a full account block; an account block mutes them in the chat regardless. Muting/unmuting and blocking/unblocking take effect for a player already in the chat; one who is not in it is unaffected until they next join.

From the user card the operator can also top up a player's hint wallet: an additive grant (1–100 hints per action) that raises the balance shown on the card. Grants are raise-only — the console can never lower a wallet (a player only loses hints by spending them in a game), so an over-grant cannot be reversed there.

The console works a feedback queue too (/_gm/feedback): the messages players sent, filtered unread / read / archived with per-user search, each shown with its sender, source, channel (with the bot language — en/ru — for a Telegram message), the sender's interface language, IP and any attachment. The operator can mark a message read, reply to the player (delivered in-app), archive it, delete it, or delete every message from that player — and, alongside a delete, bar the player from feedback (a feedback_banned role, distinct from a full account block: it stops only feedback submission). Roles are listed and granted/revoked on the user card. Opening a message does not mark it read — only the explicit actions do; message bodies and attachments are shown defensively (text escaped, attachments downloaded rather than rendered).

Advertising banner

A one-line banner under the nav shows short promotional or operational messages to free players: anyone who has not paid for a lifetime account, holds no purchased hints, and does not carry the no_banner role (which suppresses it unconditionally). Buying a paid account or any hints — or being granted no_banner — removes it; guests, the freest users, see it. When an operator changes one of those properties, the banner appears or disappears in place, without a reload.

Messages come from operator-run campaigns, each a placement order with a show weight (a percent) and an optional start/end window. Campaigns running at the same time compete for the banner in proportion to their weights; a permanent house (default) campaign fills whatever share paid campaigns leave unsold and steps aside entirely when they sell the full 100%. Each message is written in both languages (English + Russian); a player sees the variant for the bot they play through, regardless of their interface language. The client rotates the eligible campaigns fairly — every campaign gets its weighted share each cycle, evenly spread rather than at random — and a campaign with several messages shows them in turn.

Operators manage all of this in the admin console at /_gm/banners: create, edit, enable/disable and schedule campaigns, write each campaign's bilingual messages (reorder or remove them), and set the global display timings (how long a message holds, the scroll of an over-long message, and the fade-out → gap → fade-in transition between messages). The default campaign cannot be deleted and keeps at least one message.