Multiplayer Party Scrabble for 2-10 players
Simultaneous Scrabble is a concept for an online multiplayer game for 2-10 players. Its pace of play is significantly faster than normal scrabble, making it more accessible in a casual or party setting.
Play the game at scrabble.bencuan.me!
The base rules are the same as Scrabble. Everything should also apply to Simultaneous Scrabble (with the exception of rules relating to turn-based play).
Simultaneous Mode runs in rounds until the game ends (someone uses all of their letters). Each round consists of two phases: the Play Phase, where players can place their tiles, and the Challenge Phase, where players get to dispute questionable plays (e.g. QWXIY).
During this time, it’s a free-for-all: place your tiles as quickly as possible to ensure others don’t take your spot!
You can also play onto words placed on that same round, so if there are no openings it may be beneficial to wait for another player to make their turn as well.
Pressing the ‘Ready’ button during this phase indicates that you wish to skip your turn.
Players are not allowed to make moves during this time. If anyone wishes to challenge, you may press the ‘Challenge’ button next to any other player’s name. The challenge works as follows:
If no challenges need to be made, players can press the ‘Ready’ button to advance to the next round.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | Your username. |
| Room | The name of the room. Players will enter this in to connect. |
| Server | If connecting to localhost or a custom server, you can optionally enter in an address here (it should be in form <your server name here>:3000). |
| Play Style | In Simultaneous Mode, all players make their moves at the same time. Turn-Based Mode is similar to traditional Scrabble. Simultaneous is strongly recommended for larger games (>4 players). |
| Board Size | Standard is a traditional Scrabble board layout (15x15). Small is 11x11 and Large is 19x19. Small and Large have custom modifier layouts. |
| Number of Tiles | The number of tiles in the bag (normal Scrabble has 100 tiles). The game ends when all tiles are used. |
| Round Time | The time (in seconds) for each play round. For Turn-Based Mode, this is the time each player gets to play per round. Set to 0 to disable the timer. |
| Challenge Time | The time (in seconds) for each challenge round, which happens in between play rounds. Set to 0 to disable the timer. |
If you just want to play, feel free to hop onto scrabble.bencuan.me. The following instructions are for developers and those who wish to customize the game further.
Make sure that you have nodejs installed.
Clone the repository: https://github.com/64bitpandas/SimultaneousScrabble
Install dependencies: npm i
Run the nodemon server: npm start
If doing frontend development, you can instead run npx node server which will hot-reload any frontend changes (but not backend changes).
By default, the frontend is served to localhost:3001 and the backend listens to localhost:3000. Navigate to localhost:3001 to play! (Note that you will need to enter DEBUG or localhost into the ‘Server’ box to avoid connecting to the main server.)
The app is best deployed with separate handling for frontend and backend.
For the frontend, run npm run build and the app should be available to you in the build/ folder.
For the backend, npm start is good enough. The backend will automatically bind to available ports (if the PORT variable is set), and falls back to 3000 if none are found in your environment.
Created by Ben Cuan using Node.js, Express, Socket.io, React
Definition lookups and wordlist are accredited to jscrab.