game-mechanics
The board becomes readable
The game board stops being hidden from assistive technology and becomes a read-only grid that can be explored without taking control away from word input.
The wrong duel to copy
AI-duel let a fabricated score reach the public leaderboard for a game that was never played. The obvious model to copy was PvP, the other duel mode. The one that actually fit was Daily Challenge instead.
Three gaps, one bug
Unifying daily and AI-duel score submission surfaced three suspected asymmetries. Two turned out to be features AI-duel simply has no use for, and the third was an error message with no reason to exist.
The number was never the decision
A PvP host can now pick a turn time limit from 30 seconds to 3 minutes, for accessibility. Almost everywhere the old fixed 60 seconds showed up, the actual design underneath it never depended on that number at all.
The opposite tradeoff
The AI never volunteering a profanity was a free filter. Filtering what a player types into their own initials is the same list applied to the opposite tradeoff.
Eight strings, one function
A five-level nested ternary picked the caption for how a PvP game ended. The only way to exercise all eight of its outcomes was rendering the whole page.
Load-bearing in one mode
Both duel pages held their own copy of the same reveal-timing math. One input to the shared version looks redundant for AI duel and is anything but for PvP.
Descriptors, not strings
The PvP lives-teaching hints get their own pure reducer. Four candidate designs, decided on two separate axes, one of them a rule the sync-engine round had already settled.
The image that repaints itself
The daily share image gets real fruit icons, an OG-ratio canvas, and a gold rank line that fills in the moment a leaderboard submission lands.
The game never volunteers that
The Norwegian AI opponent played a profanity as its move. The fix keeps every word valid for players and just stops the game from choosing one on its own.