name	Sharp Scrabble Solver
description	Scrabble solver in C# / .NET 10 - French ODS6 to ODS9 and English Collins 2019 dictionaries
page_type	sample
languages	csharp

Sharp Scrabble Solver

A Scrabble solver and auto-player written in C# (.NET 10, WinForms). It finds the best moves on a real 15×15 board using a DAWG (Directed Acyclic Word Graph) and the classic anchor / cross-check algorithm (Appel & Jacobson), plays full games on its own, and includes a stand-alone word finder (anagrams and patterns).

Features

• Best-move search for the current rack: every legal placement, across and down, with exact scoring (letter / word multipliers, cross-words, 50-point bingo bonus). Results can be sorted by best score or by word length.
• AutoPlay 1 / AutoPlay All: the computer plays one move, or a whole two-player game, with an end-of-game count of the tiles left on the racks (official rules).
• Dictionaries: French ODS6, ODS7, ODS8, ODS9 (ODS9 by default) and English Collins 2019.
• Word finder (independent of the board): anagrams of a rack with blanks, and pattern search.
• Board editing: type letters directly on the board to set up a position, then let the solver play ("Keep tiles" makes AutoPlay All continue from the current board).
• Move history in two columns (Player 1 / Player 2). Click a word to highlight it on the board, double-click it to open its definition, click a column header to change that player's colour.
• Styled board letters: outlined letters filled with each player's colour, with a choice of 5 free fonts (SIL OFL / Apache 2.0) or the standard Windows font.
• Resizable board: the board and its tiles grow with the window.
• English / French interface, switchable at run time.
• Persistent settings (dictionary, language, colours, fonts) in %AppData%\ScrabbleSolver\settings.json.
• Save / load games.

Screenshots

Auto-play in progress	Word finder

Move search for the current rack	DAWG builder

Getting started

Requirements

• Windows 10 / 11
• .NET 10 SDK
• A recent Visual Studio with .NET 10 support (.NET desktop development workload), or just the dotnet CLI

Build and run

git clone https://github.com/xavave/Sharp-Scrabble-Solver.git
cd Sharp-Scrabble-Solver
dotnet build ScrabbleSolver.sln -c Release
dotnet run --project Dawg.Resolver.Winform.Test

Or open ScrabbleSolver.sln in Visual Studio and start Dawg.Solver.Winform.

How to use

Find the best move

1. Choose a dictionary (ODS9 is selected by default).
2. Type your letters in the P1 rack and click Search.
3. The list shows every legal move with its position and score, e.g. [H4] BONJOUR (24). Click a move to preview it on the board, then Validate word to play it.

Let the computer play

• AutoPlay 1 plays the best move for the player whose turn it is.
• AutoPlay All plays a complete game between Player 1 and Player 2. Click it again to stop. The game ends as soon as a player has used all their tiles with the bag empty (the opponent's remaining tiles are added to that player's score), or when both players pass.
• Tick Keep tiles to continue from the current board instead of starting a new game.

Word finder

Open Words finder from the main window.

Field	Meaning
Letters	Your rack. Each letter can be used once; ? is a blank (shown in lowercase, worth 0). Leave empty to allow any letter.
Pattern	Optional. A letter is fixed at its position, ? is one free square, * is zero or more squares.
Length	Word length, 0 = any length.
Use all letters	Only words that use the whole rack (bingos).

Examples: letters AEINRST alone gives all anagrams; pattern B??JOUR gives BONJOUR; letters ONAT + pattern *TION gives NOTATION, NATION, NOTION. Double-click a word to open its definition.

Solution layout

Project	Description
Dawg	DAWG dictionary: loading, word lookup, building (net10.0).
Dawg.Resolver.Winform.Test	Main WinForms application (Dawg.Solver.Winform, net10.0-windows): board, solver, auto-play, word finder.
DawgBuilder	Tool that converts a plain word list (one word per line) into a DAWG file.
DawgResolver / DawgResolverTest	Solver library and console test.
Gaddag, Scrabble, Scrabble2018, Dawg.Resolver.WPF, legacyVBAscramble	Older experiments, kept for reference.

Dictionaries

DAWG files live in Dawg/Resources/ (dico_dawgODS6.txt … dico_dawgODS9.txt, EN_Collins_dawg.txt) and are embedded in the build. To add or update a dictionary, run DawgBuilder, load a word list (for example French ODS 9 dictionary.txt) and save the result as dico_dawgODSx.txt. Words are normalised (upper case, accents removed) during the conversion.

Fonts

The board fonts (Titan One, Bowlby One, Bungee, Lilita One, Luckiest Guy) are free fonts embedded from Dawg.Resolver.Winform.Test/Resources/Fonts, with their licences in the licenses sub-folder.

Troubleshooting

• A log of the last session is written next to the executable: scrabble.log.
• To reset all settings, delete %AppData%\ScrabbleSolver\settings.json.

Version française (résumé)

Solveur de Scrabble en C# / .NET 10 (WinForms) : recherche des meilleurs coups sur le plateau, partie automatique à deux joueurs, chercheur de mots (anagrammes, jokers ?, motifs ? et *), dictionnaires ODS6 à ODS9 et Collins 2019, interface français / anglais, lettres stylées aux couleurs des joueurs et plateau redimensionnable. Compilation : dotnet build ScrabbleSolver.sln, puis lancer le projet Dawg.Solver.Winform. Les détails des corrections et de la migration sont dans ANALYSE_CORRECTIONS.md et MIGRATION_NET10.md.

License

The board fonts are distributed under their own licences (SIL Open Font License 1.1 / Apache 2.0), see Dawg.Resolver.Winform.Test/Resources/Fonts/licenses.