“Literaki” is a Polish word game, kind of like Scrabble. It’s quite popular — there’s a great mobile app, and it’s also well-known on a big board-game website.
I built a simple engine for it because I wanted to see how well we (GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio Code, and me!) could handle Haskell together.
We made two styles of play: the greedy one, which always takes the highest-scoring move, and the careful one, which changes its behavior based on simple ideas — like avoiding giving the opponent an easy bonus or not wasting a blank tile for just a few points. One side picks from a list of possible moves (I didn’t bother adding mouse tile-picking yet — maybe later), and the other plays automatically. You can even turn on autoplay!
So far, the main result is that I got to check the expected score for a full game when a strong player plays.
We also practiced profiling memory and performance — Haskell’s tools for that are honestly really nice. It was fun, and kind of delightful to see everything work!”