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Tiles

Tiles can be classic one-letter pieces, emoji graphemes, or multi-character stacks. Below is a light visual demo; open the full Playground to experiment interactively.

Tiles demo
Emoji, multi‑character, and stacked tiles (visual).
Center shows multi‑character "TH"; below it is a stacked cell.
😀1
TH4
A1
A1
stack ×3
Sample tiles
A1
TH4
😀1
?0
Use blanks to mark a chosen letter at commit time.

Tile kinds & pools​

Each entry under tileset.tile_kinds defines a reusable piece. A tile kind carries an id (stable key for racks and bags), the rendered symbol, a score, and optional flags such as is_blank or aliases (alternate glyphs that map back to the same id).

Tile kinds excerpt
{
  "tileset": {
    "tile_kinds": [
      {"id": "A", "symbol": "A", "score": 1},
      {"id": "Q", "symbol": "Q", "score": 10},
      {"id": "BLANK", "symbol": "?", "score": 0, "is_blank": true}
    ]
  },
  "tile_counts": {"A": 9, "Q": 1, "BLANK": 2}
}

The tile_counts map controls how many copies land in the bag. Any tiles omitted from the counts are treated as zero, which is a common technique for short demo racks.

Stacks and scoring options​

Enable stacking in the rules to allow multiple tiles per cell. Classic Upwords behaviour (height limit, top-only scoring, forbidding identical overlays) is handled by set_stacking(enabled, max_height, forbid_same_symbol_overlay, sum_stack_scoring) in the bindings. The engine keeps full per-cell history, so undo/redo and persistence continue to work with tall stacks.

Emoji, multi-character tiles, and blanks​

Symbols are stored as Unicode grapheme clusters, which means tiles can hold emoji, accented syllables, or digraphs such as "TH". Blanks track a runtime mark so you can capture the chosen letter for scoring, and the WASM / Python / C-ABI bindings expose helper APIs for reassigning or previewing blank marks. When mixing emoji and ASCII, enable language_packs for locale-specific normalization and case-folding behaviour.

Dive deeper​