Build Log

Tuesday night, Word Freak played its first match against BestBot from the Woogles team, the strongest crossword game AI on Earth at ~2,431 rating.

Word Freak won.

That’s real, but it is not a coronation. It was one game, on our first try, and the honest read is that variance probably helped us. A single win against BestBot is a signal worth celebrating; it is not proof that Word Freak is stronger than BestBot.

The current benchmark is more grounded: we still have not cracked a 55% win rate against Quackle. That is the next bar. Until Word Freak can beat Quackle consistently, the BestBot win belongs in the “promising but noisy” column.

Right now we’re wrapping up the engine rewrite and training against harder baselines. The goal is still Nigel Richards. The work in front of us is still Quackle.

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.