Wordful Solver

The game Wordful is an fun mind exercise. Sometimes however, I just can't see the patterns and want to move on. So, rather than spending a bit longer cracking the puzzle, why not spend a few hours writing a solver instead?

This is a small program (~130 lines of Scala minus tests) that "walks" a Wordful grid trying to match words from a dictionary.

Example Usage

The program itself expects the dictionary of words piped to its standard input. It will search this based on the linearised representation of a grid of supplied as an argument.

Assuming the following 3x3 grid (Wordful Level 1 of the "London" stage) where we need to find a 5 letter word, then a 4 letter one.

wpe
oha
snc

Finding words of any length:

cat /usr/share/dict/words \
  | scala WordfulSolver.scala wpeohasnc

Returns various words including 'an', 'ape', 'cheap' and 'peach'. However, in Wordful, you know the length of the word you're trying to find, so we can filter using a prior grep.

cat /usr/share/dict/words \
  | grep '.\{5\}' \
  | scala WordfulSolver.scala wpeohasnc

Which would then find the five-letter words 'cheap' and 'peach'. For some grids, there can still be quite a few possible results here. When this happens, the hint system in Wordful is still useful as it provides the first letter, and we can use that to further filter the results.

cat /usr/share/dict/words \
  | grep '.\{5\}' \
  | grep -i '^p.*' \
  | scala WordfulSolver.scala wpeohasnc

Which would match all five-letter words beginning with 'p', returning us the correct answer 'peach'.

Finally, once a word has been found, it is removed from the grid and we are left with gaps. This is not an issue though, as we can simply add placeholder values such as dots or spaces.

Removing 'peach' from the above grid would leave us with:

w
o
sn

While the answer is obvious in this simple level, it is considerably less so with bigger levels with grid 5x5 or even 7x7.

Finding the word in this grid can be done with the following placeholder values.

cat /usr/share/dict/words \
  | scala WordfulSolver.scala "w  o  sn "

Providing the answer, 'snow'.