Manual play and game loop

TileTactician's Play Computer mode is a turn-by-turn Crossplay game. You place a play on the board, submit it for validation, and then wait while the computer takes its turn. The home screen lets you choose Hard or Expert for a new game. If an active game is already saved, the same button continues it.

Start a game

1. From the home screen, tap Play Computer.
2. Choose Hard or Expert. A new game starts with an empty 15×15 Crossplay board, a shuffled 100-tile bag, seven tiles for each player, and a score of zero for both sides.
3. You take the first turn. The header shows the current scores and highlights whose turn it is.

The active game is persisted locally. Returning to the home screen and tapping Continue Game reopens the saved game.

Build and submit a play

When it is your turn:

1. Tap a tile in your rack.
2. Tap an empty board cell to place it. Placed-but-unsubmitted tiles are pending; tap one again to remove it.
3. Repeat until the play is complete, then tap Play.

TileTactician validates the pending placement before changing the game. A valid play must:

• put tiles in one straight row or column;
• cover the center square on the first play;
• connect to an existing tile after the first play;
• contain a valid main word and any valid perpendicular words; and
• contain no gap between the new tiles and the word they form.

The app scores the main word and any cross-words, removes the used rack tiles, draws replacement tiles from the bag, and records the move. If validation fails, the board remains unchanged and the error explains what to fix. Use Recall to remove all pending tiles without submitting them.

Other turn actions

The action bar also includes:

• Exchange — enter exchange mode, select one or more rack tiles, and tap Confirm. Exchanges are available while at least seven tiles remain in the bag. Returned tiles go back into the bag, the bag is shuffled, and the same number of replacement tiles is drawn.
• Pass — skip the turn. Two consecutive passes end the game.
• Resign — end the game immediately; the computer is recorded as the winner.
• Bag — open Tile bag & tracking to inspect the remaining distribution.

While the computer is working, the game shows Computer is thinking… and human actions are disabled. The computer uses the solver's top placement. On Expert difficulty, when the play-mode bag is empty it can use the endgame solver to choose its move; otherwise it uses the regular ranked placements. If no placement is available, it exchanges its rack when at least seven tiles are in the bag, or passes when an exchange is not possible.

How a game ends

A game finishes when either:

• both players have passed consecutively; or
• the bag is empty and one player's rack is empty.

At completion, each player's unplayed rack value is subtracted from their score. When a player goes out with an empty rack, that player receives the opponent's unplayed rack value. The higher final score wins; equal scores are a draw.

The game-over card shows the result and both final scores. Choose New Game to return to the home screen and start another game, Home to leave the mode, or View Analysis to review the completed game.

Game Summary

View Analysis reconstructs the game's board snapshots and analyzes the human moves. The GameSummary screen contains:

• Brilliancy Estimate — a 0–100 directional estimate based on reconstructed racks. It is an estimate, not a tournament rating.
• Estimated points lost — the total estimated difference from the best known moves for the reconstructed racks.
• Moves analysed — the number of human moves included in the analysis.
• Estimated Turning Points — notable swings identified by the analysis, or a clean-game message when none are found.
• Your Moves — each move's number, word, score, estimated best word and score, point delta, and blunder marker when applicable.

A move with a zero delta is labeled Best known for the reconstructed rack. Because the analysis reconstructs racks from the recorded game, the summary uses directional and approximate language rather than claiming perfect information.

Blunder Bar

The results screen includes a Blunder Bar when a prior board is available — for example, after scanning the same game again so the app can compare the before and after boards. It identifies the newly added tiles, matches them to a solver placement, and compares the played score with the best available placement.

The bar shows the played word and score, an efficiency percentage, the best word and score, and missed points. Its labels are based on efficiency:

If the best placement is a seven-tile play and the matched play is shorter, the bar also calls out that a bingo was available. If it cannot identify a matching new placement, it stays hidden rather than guessing.

Share a game recap

Tap Share Summary in GameSummary to create a short, aggregate-only recap. The versioned recap contains the result, normalized difficulty, rule profile, both scores, number of moves analyzed, directional brilliancy, and the highest- scoring sanitized human play. It is capped at 320 characters.

The recap deliberately excludes board and rack data, timestamps, identifiers, account details, OCR data, provider data, and model data. TileTactician first tries the native share sheet. If that fails, it copies the recap to the clipboard; if both options fail, it reports that the recap is unavailable.

For the board-analysis workflow that is separate from a full game, see Rack analysis.