I decided to set myself a one day code challenge to see if I could re-create a game and chose Quiddler, which is one of my all time favorite word games.

If you’d like to read about it, here’s the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiddler

I decided I wanted a shorter game for my version, since there could be up to ten copies of the same card in the original card game and also got rid of the cards with two letters on them, such as “er” along any rules around additional players since my version would be single player.

I settled on 10 rounds, with an automatic 50 point bonus if you used all the letters in your hand. You start with one vowel, one consonant, and one random card. The random cards are twice as likely to be a consonant over a vowel, but are entirely random and you receive a new one each turn.

By far the largest issue I ran into was that Python didn’t seem to have an importable complete English dictionary. The closest I could find, Enchant, did not work on my version of VS Code but did work on Replit (after a 10 second updating delay).

Is Enchant a complete dictionary? No, words like “fake” and “mutt” don’t seem to be recognized, but in testing it, enough words were accepted that I continued on. The final product is a short spelling game I hope you enjoy.

Link to code: https://github.com/Meg-Div/DigitalCraftsProjects/tree/main/spelling-game

Link to game: https://replit.com/@Meg-Div/quiddler#main.py