You and your opponent share a rack of letters, and vowels are only obtained by opting to deduct a configurable amount of points from your score to receive a random vowel tile. Additionally, there is an alternate board layout with some new tile multipliers.
This is an old project but I never posted it, so I thought what the hey, I am curious to hear what your guys' thoughts are on these rules. It's an old dead project so you can't hurt my feelings. Thanks!
You can play it now against the computer in your browser (no signup required, but an account lets you create and play games against other humans). The Android app is the better version only because the AI will run on a seperate thread (in the browser version you might see a hiccup while it runs), and because Unity WebGL doesn't export retina-sized graphics (ie graphics may look less than sharp on your mobile device).
(Note: I linked the landing page instead of the direct link to play in case you are on mobile and want to avoid a largish download. Direct link to play in the browser is here: https://crapple.mobi/play)
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Some more details for anyone still reading...
It's your basic LAMP stack on AWS, with Laravel for the web framework and Unity (2017) for the client.
The dictionary is stored as a DAWG.
When you play a word, instead of giving you the dictionary definition, I wanted to do something different like provide a paragraph from a book that the word was used in. You can click the book icon to get some of those, I was scraping books in the public domain but gave up after a while when I was getting diminishing returns for words I lacked paragraphs for (if you try it you will likely see a lot of Moby Dick paragraphs as I never randomized it either).
The AI was based on the scrabble AI algorithm (I think it was this, but can't remember now, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437020...). Since Crapple has modified rules, due the possibility of "buying" vowels on your turn, there is set of _potential_ playable words. The Crapple AI ranks each word based on the cost of the vowels needed with their probability of obtaining the needed vowels. The AI is not very intelligent, the difference between the 3 provided computer opponents is just the average word score they will play. If I had worked on this any longer I could have extended this to let them take into account what words/scores they may be setting you up for with their play, and other ideas.
Each player's avatar is consistent, but uniquely generated for them. I didn't want to have every using the same boring default avatar, but didn't want the hassles of letting people upload their own, so I went with a version of this idea: http://www.levitated.net/bones/walkingFaces/index.html