Word Detective is a multilingual word puzzle game where players find all hidden words that can be formed using only seven letters displayed in a hexagonal interface.

Play it here.

The game automatically generates puzzles from text sources (books, articles, word lists) and serves them through an interactive web interface. Players are presented with 7 letters and must discover all valid words that can be spelled using only those letters.

Key Features:

• Multiple puzzle modes: Daily, Weekly, Random, and Custom (from uploaded text)
• Multi-language support: English, French, Italian, and Portuguese
• Word definitions lookup as players progress
• Progress persistence via browser cookies
• Hint system to help stuck players

The project consists of three main components:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              WEB BROWSER (Frontend)                     │
│    HTML/CSS + JavaScript (Webpack bundle)               │
│    Game UI, state management, cookie persistence        │
└──────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────┘
                       │ HTTP/REST API
┌──────────────────────▼──────────────────────────────────┐
│             NODE.JS SERVER (Express.js)                 │
│    REST API endpoints, template rendering               │
│    Spawns C++ binaries for puzzle generation            │
└──────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────┘
                       │ Child Process
┌──────────────────────▼──────────────────────────────────┐
│              C++ BACKEND (CMake)                        │
│    Puzzle generation engine, data structures            │
│    Unicode text processing, word validation             │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The core puzzle generation engine written in C++17:

• Data Structures: The Brick is a tree structure inspired by the Trie, where each path represents a set of characters and stores all words that can be spelled using exactly those characters. This makes puzzle generation a simple tree traversal: pick a path of 7 characters, and you instantly have all valid words for that puzzle.
• Text Processing: Unicode-aware text segmentation with ICU library support for multiple languages
• Applications:
  • word-detective: Generates puzzle JSON from pre-built word data
  • export-brick: Converts raw text files into optimized binary .brk files

Express.js web server providing:

• REST API for puzzle generation and word definitions
• Game routes for different puzzle modes (daily, weekly, random, custom)
• Binary service bridge to execute C++ executables
• Internationalized UI templates

Vanilla JavaScript (ES6 modules) bundled with Webpack:

• Interactive hexagonal letter interface
• Game state management and word validation
• Cookie-based progress persistence
• Word definition display

source/
├── word-detective-backend/     # C++ core engine
│   ├── app/
│   │   ├── word-detective/     # Puzzle generation executable
│   │   └── export-brick/       # Text to .brk converter
│   ├── modules/
│   │   ├── datastr/            # Brick and Trie data structures
│   │   ├── utils/              # Text processing utilities
│   │   └── standard-extensions/
│   └── lab/test/               # Unit tests (Catch2)
│
├── server/                     # Node.js web server
│   ├── modules/api/            # REST API routes
│   ├── games/                  # Game mode templates
│   └── assets/
│       ├── messages/           # UI translations (en, fr, it, pt)
│       └── corpora/            # Word lists per language
│
├── word-detective-js/          # Frontend JavaScript
│   └── src/modules/            # Game controller, definitions, cookies
│
└── word-source-manager/        # Python utility for word sources

• C++: Boost (filesystem, system), ICU, nlohmann/json (shipped)
• Node.js: Express, node-fetch, express-fileupload
• Python: Jinja2 (for template rendering)
• Build: CMake 3.13+, Webpack

cd word-detective
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="../install" \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -DBUILD_TESTS=ON \
      ..
make install

CMake options:

• BUILD_TESTS=ON/OFF - Build unit tests (default: OFF)
• BUILD_BENCHMARKS=ON/OFF - Build performance benchmarks (default: OFF)
• BUILD_STATIC=ON/OFF - Static linking (default: OFF)

cd build
ctest --output-on-failure

cd source/server
npm install
npm start

Generate a puzzle from a text file:

./install/app/word-detective --input-file books/jekyll.txt --language en

Convert a word list to optimized brick format:

./install/app/export-brick --input-file wordlist.txt --output-file words.brk --language en

See LICENSE file for details.