Following the journey from first move to final match. Benchmarks, breakthroughs, and everything in between.
Tuesday night, Word Freak played its first match against BestBot — Cesar Del Solar’s engine, the strongest crossword game AI on Earth at ~2,431 rating.
Word Freak won.
We skipped Quackle, skipped Hasty Bot, and went straight at the best. More details on the game coming soon — we need to go back through it properly.
Right now we’re wrapping up the engine rewrite, and then training all weekend. The goal is Nigel Richards. This was the first step.
Sprint 27 is closed.
Co-op multiplayer — two players, one board, real-time cursor sync, shared tile placement. Room codes for invites. Running on Convex with 25 passing backend tests.
Codebase audit — ran three independent technical auditors and four legal/regulatory auditors against the full codebase. Technical grade: C+. Legal grade: D. Fixed 10 findings the same night.
Legal framework — shipped a privacy policy, terms of service, and “The Promise” (7 commitments that fit on a business card). All released under CC BY 4.0. Also added a consent gate with age verification and account deletion.
The Word Freak engine is now open source.
RoundsForSquares/wordfreak-engine — a GADDAG-based Scrabble engine written in Rust, with WASM bindings for browser use. MIT licensed.
Every legal move on any board in under 3 milliseconds. 1,500+ full games per second. The same engine that powers our self-play training pipeline is now available for anyone to use, fork, and build on.
People were asking. Now it’s here.