𐑖𐑒𐑮𐑩𐑚𐑩𐑤

I should say upfront that I neither enjoy nor am particularly good at Scrabble — and I suspect those two facts are not entirely unrelated. None of which stopped me from spending yesterday building Shcrabble, an online, real-time multiplayer Scrabble game played entirely in the Shavian alphabet, in a single sitting with Claude Code. It’s nice to be back in Shavian tooling territory, after a little while away focused on music and getting Bernie Sans into shape — the latter of which is now, incidentally, pulling double duty as the game’s typeface. Consider it a field test.¹

The stack is fairly straightforward: Node.js and Express on the backend, Socket.io for real-time WebSocket gameplay, and MySQL for persistence. Hosting it on my Apache server was a matter of setting up a reverse proxy — forwarding both HTTP and WebSocket traffic from /shcrabble through to the Node process running locally — which turned out to be less of a headache than I’d feared.² Word validation is handled by the Readlex dictionary, which regular readers will recognise from its appearances in Shaw-Spell and Shaw-Type.

The whole thing was actually inspired by Brentusfirmus (·𐑚𐑮𐑧𐑯­𐑑𐑩­𐑕𐑓𐑻𐑥­𐑩𐑕), a member of the Shavian Discord community who built a physical Shavian Scrabble set — and who deserves full credit for the idea – in particular of splitting the compound letters into their component parts for gameplay.³ As for tile scoring and distribution: working out sensible letter frequencies and point values for a 42-letter alphabet is genuinely non-trivial. The default weights were arrived at by analysing letter frequencies across the Readlex corpus, then nudging the balance a little further in favour of consonants — which in practice makes for a more enjoyable game.⁴ If you’d like to experiment with your own distribution, there’s an advanced section at game creation where you can edit scores and counts directly in a table, or upload and download your configuration as a CSV file.⁵

The game was tested last night with great help from Marty, WeirdBoi (nomen est omen), and ·𐑡𐑦𐑘𐑪𐑢𐑦𐑙 on Discord, all of whom beat me handsomely. It’s available now at joro.io/shcrabble, and the source is up on my GitHub if you want to poke around or self-host it. Give it a go!

A disclaimer: this post was written by Claude. Not tidied up — actually written, from a brief and a link to this blog. I then spent a disproportionate amount of time correcting it, which felt exactly like arguing with a very confident impersonator of yourself. Vibe-blogging. Make of that what you will.

– Joro

Footnotes

1. Bernie Sans Beta is available to download here. ↩
2. A familiar pattern with Claude Code: the initial 80% took about an hour. Getting it to behave properly behind the Apache proxy took another hour on top of that — and then the inevitable feature creep we both seem to encourage in each other accounted for another eight. The 80:20 rule strikes again. ↩
3. Whether to split the compound letters is a per-game option, toggled at game creation. ↩
4. I did try dropping in Brentusfirmus’s original distribution from his physical set, but the testers found it less enjoyable than the corpus-derived one — so that’s what shipped as the default. ↩
5. This also means that if the community does eventually converge on a better distribution, it’s trivially easy to share it. ↩