Lexical: Making Fair Fairer
sjc, 23 February 2023
We’ve just released another small update to Lexical. Most of the changes are behind-the-scenes, intended to make the game run more smoothly, but we’ve also made one change to how the game plays.
When we re-wrote Lexical back in 2016, we added a new game mode: ‘Gold Letter’ (or ‘Golden Letter’, depending on how I feel, consistency being for the uncreative). The idea is that one letter on the game board will be chosen at random to be ‘it’, the gold(en) letter which the player has to include in their next word. Ever since we introduced it, however, there’s been a nagging feeling that something was slightly off. Maybe one of the few ‘special’ tiles would be selected, robbing the player of the opportunity to earn extra time or a higher score. Worse of all, the player would occasionally be left in an unwinnable situation, typically if a ‘Q’ was selected with no ‘U’ to be found on the board. It is one of the unforeseen consequences of using randomness to generate your game.
(Note to self: I should really market Lexical as a procedurally-generated rougelite word game.)
So what have we done to fix this?
Firstly, we’ve done something we should have a decade ago, and made sure that Lexical’s word list contains a good selection of “Q-without-U” words. We hope this will also benefit the ‘classic’ game mode, but on its own it isn’t quite enough.
So, secondly, we’ve updated the logic for choosing which tile becomes the gold letter. We’ve replaced the completely random selection process with one which only considers tiles which aren’t special and which aren’t the letter ‘Q’. It’s a small, long-overdue change to make Lexical fairer and, we hope, more fun.