Scrabble Clone -- #100DaysOfCode

Rodney J. Woodruff

2021 marks the twenty-second year that I have been married to this beautiful woman below. We have played a competitive game of scrabble several times per week for the vast majority of those 22 years. We started with the traditional scrabble board and then moved on to the Scrabble App on iOS devices.

We loved this version of Scrabble. We used the “Play and Pass” option which allowed us to play using the same iPad. We could play until one of us reached a pre-determined score or we could play until one of us played all of our letters. There was also a built-in dictionary where we could try out words before playing them. There was also a wizard that would tell us when we could have played a better word. Finally, we could use the wizard, up to 4 times, to play the best word for us. This game was awesome.

That Scrabble version was discontinued and replaced with Scrabble Go. Scrabble Go has way too many bells and whistles and animations. It doesn’t allow “Play and Pass”. We have to play on separate devices which requires us to create separate accounts and then add each other as friends. We also considered Words with Friends. The account requirements for for Words with Friends and Scrabble Go made us uncomfortable. We didn’t understand why we needed to create accounts to play again that we could play side by side. We actually bought the upgraded version of the Scrabble iOS App. So, cost was not a concern.

#100DaysOfCode is a challenge to build a habit of coding. Some people use it to learn to code. Other people use it as a way to learn something new about coding or to build something that they have been thinking about building for quite a while. Today is my first day of the #100DaysOfCode challenge.

I decided that I would build my own Scrabble clone that would have the features that my wife and I love with some additonal things that we wished the other versions would have. So, the first hobby app that I will be taking on is make a clone of these two games:

Scrabble Go

Image Credit: Scopely

Words with Friends 2

Image Credit: Zynga

I fully expect that this will take some serious effort and time. Mentally, I expect it to take at least 30 days of coding for me to hit a groove. But, I don’t expect to be completed in 100 days. I just hope that my momentum is going so that I can keep going.

I will be using the following tools to build the first version of the app.