Board Game Arena

As someone who has played word games, I find the default dictionary of 12dicts quite frustrating. Here are some words rejected by (at least this version of) 12dicts:

BLOCKIER https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blockier

KHANATE https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/khanate

UNPADDED https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unpadded

These are not even especially rare words. "khanate" is the equivalent word of kingdom for something ruled by a khan. I'd wager anyone reading this knew right away what BLOCKIER and UNPADDED mean.

I love this game. By far my favorite in the year-plus I've used BGA. I'm very grateful to quietmint for making it available here. But I find 12dicts so frustrating that if it's the default, I might not ever play in arena for Hardback, which I'm otherwise anticipating quite happily.

The developer seems to be unbudging on this topic: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=34237
But setting Arena option as '(free choice)' would work at least in Arena mode (I favor 12dicts for various reasons though).

Thanks for that, ufm. I'm still confused as to *why* the developer decided that the default "dictionary" would be 12dicts. It's not a dictionary, it's a reference list made from combining other reference lists for, from what I can tell, spell-checkers. Why does a word game default to only using words that that are "common"?

"KHANATE" is a sufficiently common word to have a Wikipedia disambiguation page, for instance -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khanate_(disambiguation).

I think that people who like word games often like, y'know, words? ("What is Hardback? Hardback is a deck-building word game." -- Hardback rules) It's like a restaurant that defaults to the kids' menu for everyone, not just the children or the people with them, and if you want the adult menu you have to ask for it.

Please present your free and unrestricted dictionary that addresses all the same criteria (no proper nouns, no hyphenated words, no phrases, has infected word forms like -ier, -iest, -ing) and also solves your gripes with 12dicts, then we'll talk...

Until someone can offer a better alternative at no cost, I can't replace 12dicts with something better like Oxford or Merriam-Webster ($$$).

Are the British & American Scrabble lists that the game uses as options not free and not inclusive?

Ah, got it, you are concerned about the Arena mode (which doesn't exist yet!). Someone has started a poll about it here: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 70&t=21062

For non-Arena games, the default options don't have much importance. They should probably reflect the best thing for beginnings / new players. After you change your preferences for this game once, however, BGA will remember that choice for all your future games.

fr13day wrote: ↑01 May 2021, 07:29 Are the British & American Scrabble lists that the game uses as options not free and not inclusive?

I'd like to see an answer to this. Why not make one of these as the default? I've had words as common as "resize" rejected. This is not something you want to happen in a word game.

First of all, no dictionary is perfect. I think 12dicts is the best choice available. Scrabble includes many obscure "non-word" entries like "aal", "abac", "faix", "xu", "zol", "zyzzyvas". I think these are junk, and I wouldn't accept these words if my opponent spelled them in a real-life game of Hardback. Scrabble is also quite inconsistent, including some proper nouns but not others with no apparent reasoning (Easter but not Christmas? Berlin and Paris but not Chicago?). In any case, the default dictionary choice doesn't really matter for non-arena games anyway. You can choose whichever dictionary you want when you create your table (when using the manual mode) or when finding tables to join (when using the automatic lobby) -- you only need to do this once, and BGA automatically remembers these game options for your future games.

While Google and companies with unlimited money can afford to license a premium dictionary like Oxford or Merriam-Webster, but BGA cannot pay these costs, especially for a free (non-premium) game. You can see the Oxford pricing at https://developer.oxforddictionaries.com/ -- it costs about $0.0028 USD per lookup. That might not sound like a lot, but based on current stats, there are around 100 - 200 games per day with an average of 2.8 players each spelling 17.8 words per game. If all those games were to use Oxford's dictionary, it would be around 5,000 - 10,000 lookups and $14 - $28 per day in costs. Yikes! Premium members on BGA only pay $2 per month and that money is already split between site upkeep and game licensing costs.

For the Arena mode, there's a poll at https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 70&t=21062 about the dictionary to use for competitive games.

There's really nothing more to say on this matter.

American Scrabble also rejects words I consider very common. (I lost a recent game of Hardback partly due to 'Pilates' not being accepted.)

I think I'm going to default to voting on the acceptability of words in future, and just google a respected online dictionary in case of argument.

Scrabble and most of word games reject proper nouns for obvious reasons, and 'Pilates' is a proper noun.
If you're playing with Scrabble dictionaries don't expect 'India', 'Latin', or 'April' to be accepted.

Then why 'Easter', 'Berlin', and 'Paris' are valid?
This happens when the word incorporates at least 1 different meaning other than the one commonly known.
'easter' is a verb, 'berlin' is a type of wool or carriage, and 'paris' is a herb (all not capitalized).
Of course these are obscure and/or archaic, however they are nonetheless valid words according to the rules.

CSW includes words meeting this condition way more than NWL.
For example, spelling 'jesus' as an exclamation is a legal play in CSW but not in NWL.

After all, no dictionary is perfect.