unrailed meets scrabble.

what dictionary does this use, i tried a few words that i was pretty sure are in the scrabble set but didnt work here. (could be wrong)

for me the train is a little bit too fast for the letter input method. like even if i have a word by the time i get all the tiles down the train has made more progress than my word added. some kind of way to get a bonus for longer words that gives you more time feels like it would be a nice balance tweak. like risky, take more time to find a longer word but more payoff for doing it. basically makes me look at the rack and say... do i have a long word here... do i have time to find it...

There's an annoying bug where, if you're building off the word the train is currently travelling on, it marks the prior word as invalid, so you can't continue building your extension (even if the train hasn't reached your intersection point yet). This means you auto-fail if the train reaches the current latest word while you're working on the next one.

Interesting game. I like the concept but I feel like it could do with some tweaks.

I think the instructions should be expanded a bit. The details of how the added tiles would affect the train's path were not at all clear to me. It also took me a while to even understand that I was supposed to add words in crossword/scrabble style, rather than just being able to add a new word at the end of my previous one.

The scoring is also a bit weird. Like, the instructions say "reach the star to win". Usually when the goal is to reach a certain point, well, you win if you reach that point. And if anything, your goal is usually to reach it as quickly as possible. But in this game the score is based on the words you put down, so you actually can get a higher score by delaying reaching the goal. That concept isn't bad and can be a cool twist, but it's not at all conveyed by just saying "reach the star to win".

Finally, the mechanism for entering words makes this borderline too cumbersome for me to play repeatedly. I want to be able to type the letters using the keyboard, or at least have some option like double-clicking to add another letter at the end of the partial word I've already placed. Having to drag each individual letter into position is really annoying.

But overall, fun idea!

Was confused because it wasn't letting me spell words upwards (I had spelled "Trained" horizontally and then tried to spell "Duke" starting with the D at the end and going vertically up). Great concept !

Edit: I think the train may be too fast (currently playing on mobile)

This is dangerously addictive. The constraint of having to build towards a specific point completely changes the usual Scrabble strategy. I found myself making sub-optimal, silly words just to force the track in the right direction. Perfect coffee-break game. Also, the mobile app or PWA of this game would be great!

Cool game - maybe pause if you're prompting the user to enter a name.

it's fun! if you want add more challenges, maybe only allow word from certain topic will be great addition, or make certain tile have hardcoded word

Great game. You could maybe have it pause the train a variable amount if you get double/triple words or letters or higher than 50 points for a word. Then you get rewarded for better play.