Word games engine

Wordplay is a collection of word puzzles on the web, served as wp.chaipat.cc in his research network. It combines classic daily puzzles with solvers and a real-time multiplayer race.

Games and tools

• Woodle: a Wordle-style game where you guess a five-letter word in six tries.
• Spelling Bee: make words from seven letters, always using the centre one.
• Connections: sort words into four hidden groups.
• Cryptogram: crack a substitution cipher.
• Word Search.
• Pattern Finder: find words by prefix, suffix or letter pattern.
• Anagram Solver and Crossword Helper.
• Word Race: a real-time multiplayer game over WebSockets.

How it's built

• Front end: React 19 with React Router, built with Vite.
• Back end: Node.js and Express, with Socket.io for multiplayer, and JSON Web Tokens and bcrypt for accounts.
• Data: a dictionary engine on PostgreSQL, with Redis as a cache. It uses a Trie data structure, a prefix tree, so pattern and anagram searches only follow paths that can still form words.
• Tests: unit tests with Vitest and React Testing Library, and end-to-end tests with Playwright.
• Hosting: deployed on Vercel.

See also

• Web applications

Pictures