But, he adds, manually going through Challenges helps him develop better ways to improve his automated system, which in the long run will decrease the amount of time he has to spend deliberating over new words. “I can do about 800 an hour, but it is exhausting,” he says. Out of these, Gage had manually reviewed about 3,000 submissions, the rest are handled by an automated system. When we spoke last month, Gage said that 17,000 words had been denied, while 1,600 had been accepted to the system. It feels good and weirdly radical to be making an attempt to up-end this stupid inherited system.” SpellTower is about finding words you know, and so it should allow things that are words, even if they’re proper nouns, when it’s reasonable. “Not every word game is about cut-throat competition. “Why does everyone who plays a word game have to acquiesce to a rule designed for hyper-competitive Scrabble players?” Gage asked. Scrabble may be the most influential player in the word game space, but that may not be for the better, Gage argues. “Obviously lots of proper nouns are absolutely real words, and I feel like the whole idea of word-search games is to be able to find words you know.” “I feel like Scrabble decided ‘no proper nouns’ because it was a clean rule, not because it was a good rule,” he mused. Who hasn’t gotten over an argument over what words we can play in Scrabble? It’s a process that has given him a different outlook on existing word games, which are sometimes infamously rigid. “I tried to be as inclusive as I could be without dipping into any ‘infinite’ categories where I would have to make a personal judgement call,” he said. And things like constellations and species are definitely welcome within the compendium, Gage says. You can submit slang, as long as it’s not vulgar. You can’t submit names, places, or abbreviations, for example. While Spelltower+’s living dictionary is extremely flexible, developer Zach Gage told Polygon over Twitter that he still has some ground rules. As of this writing, the top Challenger is a user with the name uncurtaining, who has managed to get 40 words into the system. You only get three Challenges, but the number doesn’t go down if your request is successful.Ĭhallenging in and of itself could even be considered a game, because the more you file, the better you place on the Challenge leaderboard.

If you’re successful, the word gets added to your wordlist and will be available for play. When you construct a word that Spelltower+ does not recognize, the game automatically asks if you want to submit a Challenge, which will prompt a review of your submission in real time. The words we conjure aren’t any less real, of course. Worse, because language is so fluid, we constantly use words in our day-to-day lives which may not yet be recognized by “official” entities, like Merriam-Webster. The thing about word games is that you are at the mercy of the built-in dictionary, which may not include the word you’re thinking of.