Hacker News Reader

Comment by xpe | Hacker News Reader

Rule question: In the tutorial, on the "Combatants" screen:

> Only words touching another player's words are involved in a battle. This means you can win battles even though your board contains invalid words.

> Try playing playing "TO" against your opponent's "FT".

> Even though your board is mostly valid, the only words involved in the battle were "TO" and "FT", so you won and "FT" was removed from the board.

This doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that "TO" should only battle the opponent's "F" because the opponent has "TOUR" adjacent to "F".

If my interpretation was right, only "F" should have been removed.

View on HN

In battles, weak words compromise all of their letters. "TOUR" would be safe, but the "FT" ruins the "T" by making it part of an invalid word — and an invalid word that loses is removed in its entirety.

Thanks for pointing it out! It's something we have had come up before, and the sort of thing we keep iterating the tutorial toward explaining better, so we'll take another crack at it!

Thanks for your reply. In your meaning, a 'word' is just a contiguous string of letters in one direction... So in this way a 'word' can be invalid or valid.

But (pedantic note) it is a little more specific than that. It includes ALL letters until the edge of the board or space on the board. Right?

Do most people consider an invalid word to be a kind of word? I don't think I do, and I think this was the source of my confusion. But I'm not a word-game person per se nor Scrabble expert... this might be obvious to other people.

Interesting! This might be our Scrabble bias showing through. Yes, when we say "word" I suppose we're meaning "something that a player has claimed to be a word" by placing contiguous tiles. I'll look at somewhere to clarify language in the tutorial.

Very interesting thread! As computer people, I suspect "string" would make sense to encompass both "sequence of letters" and (valid) "word". But that wouldn't work for most people. Maybe just "sequence"... Or maybe just stick with "word" but add this caveat to the tutorial, like you were thinking :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com