Anagrams

Click here to play online

Anagrams is a classic word game of thought and thievery. For many players, including myself, their first encounter with Anagrams occurred at the end of a long day of playing tournament Scrabble™, but it has a long popular history as well. Originating in Victorian England (according to the Wikipedia article, the first published version dates to 1877 or earlier. It has appeared in various tabletop versions over the years, one of which even made its way into a Hitchcock movie:

It can be played with any set of letter tiles, but until recently there has not been any way to play over the web.

How to Play

Gameplay is simple: A certain number of tiles are placed face down into a pool on the table. As they are turned over one at a time, players attempt to form words out of them. If a player is successful at finding a word, they arrange the tiles to spell out the word and place them in front of themselves. There is no penalty for guessing incorrectly.

Play continues as before, except that now it is possible to steal an existing word. This means adding one or more tiles from the pool to a word to form a longer word. If you steal your opponent's word, it now belongs to you! You may also steal you own words to prevent anyone else from stealing them first.

There is one small catch, however. In order to make a steal, you must rearrange at least two of the tiles. For example it would be possible to steal LAUNCHPAD from CHALUPA, but you could not steal READING to form PREBOARDING because the latter can be spelled by inserting letters into the former without changing their order.

In order to reward longer words, your score is equal to the square of the word's length, and the winner is whoever has the most points at the end of the game.

Development

Prerequisites

1. The Java 20 JDK
2. If developing on Linux see here for information on setting up a development environment, or use the prepared Docker container: docker pull grubbcc/jpro-base:jre20-fx20.
3. Recommended: The GitHub CLI tool. See here for Linux download instructions.
4. In order to build the webserver: Docker and docker-compose.

How to develop locally

1. Download/clone repository, e.g. gh repo clone grubbcc/anagrams -- -b main.
2. Navigate to anagrams\AnagramsServer and execute gradlew run. (On Linux systems first do chmod +x gradlew.)
3. In another terminal navigate to anagrams\AnagramsJPro and execute gradlew jproRun. (For a full list of JPro commands, see here.)
4. In a browser tab open localhost:8079 to see the application.
5. To register an account, you will need to enable the email verification service. Edit the from and password fields in LoginMenu.java to match an email account you control.

Setting up the webserver

1. In anagrams\AnagramsServer run gradlew distZip.
2. In anagrams\AnagramsJPro run gradlew jproRelease.
3. Extract the generated archives (under \build\distributions) into anagrams\Webserver.
4. From Webserver, run docker -t anagrams build.
5. Run docker-compose up.
6. Open localhost or your public IP in a browser tab to see the app. (For web access you will need to configure your network and firewall to accept HTTP traffic.)
7. To use the API, enter a URL of the form localhost/<NWL20|CSW21>/<anyword>. Click here for an example. Click here for full API documentation.