LexiCube

LexiCube: Build words from adjacent letters, and watch your score go up while your pile of letters goes down!

Lexicube starts with a pile of letters six high, six wide… and six deep! Only the top letters are visible but, as you make words these letters go away and you get to see deeper and deeper into the pile. Your goal is to maximise your score, which will mean using your letters carefully and strategically.

Rules, rules, rules. We are still working on the rules, so we have a few exciting choices for you to make. Let me start with the recommended settings:

1. Rows, colums, layers… leave these at six.
2. Endless… good for practice, but its no game! Leave it off.
3. Adjacency… try it off if you want, but I recommend you start with that on. Much more strategic.
4. Char: Proportional. Yeah, leave that on. Otherwise you get as many ‘X’ as you do ‘E’. Hey, if you want to beat yourself up, turn it off.
5. Minimum Length: Most games don’t do one and two letter words so leave this at three.
6. Length: Now this gets really interesting. How important do you want longer words to be? Do you want to sacrifice everything for one more letter? Anyway, I recommend you leave it at ‘exponential’ for now. That will allow you to compare scores with others.
7. Layer: Now HERE is a real choice. Leave it at ‘divide’ if you want to be super careful to always choose from the same layer. Change it to ‘multiply’ if you want to get some huge scores by choosing letters from as many different layers as possible. (That’s the way I love to play! Scores in the 1000’s and fun choices. But the other is fun too).

Strategy. Assuming you are using those settings then…

1. Work from the outside in. Stacks on the outside are much more likely to get isolated if you work a lot in the middle.
2. Work at getting rid of awkward combinations. Did the computer give you four ‘E’s somewhere? Well, then, find a word that uses a couple of them and get yourself a better combination.

Comments! Remember we are still working on the game. A comment from you at the right time can help us make it even better! Don’t like something, comment on it. It is in the development stage, so we might just say, “Yeah, working on that.” But, on the other hand, several comments have already been added to the game!

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NEW SETTINGS:

Layer Colors: Choose what color each layer will be on the board

Pile Clear Bonus: This number of points will be awarded upon exhausting a pile of tiles (using up one spot on the grid)

Layer Clear Bonus: This number of points will be awarded upon using up all tiles for a single layer

Distribution: the old ratio management is on the new Dictionary page (see below). Now, this can be set to "Independent" or "Shuffle". Independent is the old method, where each tile is generated directly from the probability. Shuffle populates the board proportionally to the probability distribution instead.

NEW PAGE:

The dictionary page is where you can manage your word list and your character probabilities. You can load from a corpus of text, filtering for minimum-length words. Make sure to normalize your unicode before loading non-ascii text!

The initial character weights are set by the frequency in the corpus loaded before deduplication of words; so, if "cat" is in it twice (and you loaded with a length minimum of 3 or less), "c", "a", and "t" will each be incremented twice.

CONFIG MANAGEMENT:

Configuration (settings+dictionary) is now saved locally and can persist between sessions. No need to set up every time now!

Configurations can also be exported and imported on the Settings page, so you can share rule-sets you like.