AlphaBox

Open-source implementation of Letter Boxed including puzzle generation and solver.

Now that the original game has been placed behind a paywall, I created this fork of Litter Boxed and have started adding new features, including..

• Dark mode support (and theming override)
• Improved puzzle solving validation
• Random game generator for infinite play
• View solutions for any generated puzzle
• Smooth animations
• A "par" system similar to what you have in the original game
• Streak tracking

Trivia

• Puzzle generation is ensured in the browser.
• Two different lists are used: an easy list so that puzzles have a simple solution and a complete list for input validation.
• Daily puzzles are generated by seeding the random generator with the date.
• Unlike the NYT puzzles, we guarantee that there is always a solution with two words that repeats only the common letter (e.g. LANDS > SECURITY).

More trivia

• Puzzle generation is done by sampling two words (in O(1)) then checking whether the letters can be arranged on a square.

  • It would be OK to enumerate the 12!/(3!^4*4!) = 15 400 possibilities, but to be more efficient, we adapted Ali Aassaf's Algorithm X in JavaScript.

• Puzzle solving is pretty boring:

  • Select words that can be written in the grid
  • For each letter, bruteforce the pairs of words that begin/end with this letter