ONLINE-SPIELE

Scrabble 3D by Igor Galochkin

INSTRUCTIONS (must read before play):

This is a 3D version of a well-known Scrabble game. This means that words must be build in three directions. Such a game is impossible to make in the physical world, but here it is on the screen of your computer.

The rules of scrabble were simplified: you get score not for words or letter values, but simply for the number of pieces you dispose of in your turn. And there are no bonus-cells. The field is 9x9x9 (in original scrabble it was 15x15).

Pieces - Score
1 - 1
2 - 3
3 - 5
4 - 8
5 - 12
6 - 18
7 - 30

If you do not place any pieces in your turn, you loose 1, but all of your current pieces are replaced, so this might be a good option if you get some really bad combination of letters. The player who first gets 150, wins.

Also a nice thing compared to the board version is that when you take new pieces in the beginning of a new turn, each letter has a certain probability (corresponds to the frequency of it in English). In usual board version there was only one Q and one Z in the store, so, say, the word "fuzzy" had no chance to appear on the borad. Here you can get even 4 or 5 of letter Z at one time (however the odds of that are very low).

Since this is a very simple game (I wrote it in 2 days from scratch), there is no word-checking system and no AI. It is simply a board game of scrabble but transferred into 3-dimensional space. The computer won't check if the words you place really exist, also it won't be able to place anything itself. If you do not have a friend to play with, set 1-player mode and play alone. It is pretty exciting, too. And the last thing - there is no "*" piece (which usually acts as any letter and can be then replaced by another player).

CONTROLS:

ENTER - ends turn (if no pieces were placed all of your current pieces will be replaced next turn)

ESC or Q - restart game.

Right-click - move the view.

Left-click - take a piece, put a piece.

When is it possible to place a piece in hand somewhere (it is inside the field and it's current position is not already occupied by another piece), the letters on the sides of the piece will highlight.

UP-arrow / DOWN-arrow - next/previous layer. This is a very useful option. Layers differ in color. For example, the 4th layer is green, so if you are currently in the 4th layer, your piece in hand and the pieces on the panel will also be green. When you move your mouse, you will remain in the same layer, to ju´mp to another layer, you must press UP/DOWN. When you jump from one layer to another, the color of the piece in hand will change. The game will help you to see all pieces of the current layer by blending any piece overlapping the area around your cursor.

W, E , R - change layers axis. On default the layers axis is W, and you can leave it so until there is really lots of pieces on the field overlapping each other. Then you might sometimes need to change the layers order for better view of crowded areas. This function is useful, because it will change the blending mode and will let you see some words in one layer, if previously they were going through different layers and could not easily be tracked because of the need to switch between layers to see each letter.