Anagrams is a word game about anagrams. In this website you can play the game with friends on the internet.

How to play

When you first open the page it will ask you for your name. Type your name or a nickname, click “Play!” and then you will immediately be in a game. Your name appears in a white box on the board. That box is yours and during the game you will put your words next to it. If there are other players who want to play at the same time, their names will also appear. People can join the game up until the first tile is turned. To turn a tile and start the game, click on the “Turn” button.

• Players take turns turning over one tile to show it by clicking on the “Turn” button. The box for the current player is green.
• At any moment, any player can name a word which can be created out of the unused letters. It needs to be at least three letters long. When you think that you have a word, push the “Shout!” button. Your box becomes red for 10 seconds. During that time you can move the word to your box. If the other players agree that it is a valid word, it can stay there. Otherwise you have to put it back in the middle.
• Also at any moment, any player can steal a word from another player if they can make it longer. The new word has to use at least one letter from the middle and every letter from the stolen word. The new word can’t just be a different form of the original word. For example you can steal “bat” to make “stab”, but you can’t just add the “s” on the end to make “bats”. To steal a word, just click on “Shout!” and put it in your box like for other words.
• The game is over when all of the letters have been turned over and everybody agrees that it’s no longer possible to make a word. The amount of remaining letters can be seen in the bottom-right corner of the board. The winner is the player with the most words in their box. If there is a draw, the number of letters wins instead.

The website doesn’t enforce the rules of the game so if you agree with the other players you can play however you want. Try not to take the game too seriously and just have fun.

How to move the tiles

To move a tile you can just drag it with the mouse. Once you’ve moved the first tile, you can put another one next to it more quickly by just clicking on it.

Shortcut keys

• Push enter to shout
• Push the spacebar to turn a new letter

Chat

Quite often you can end up in a debate about whether a word is valid. Underneath the board, there’s a chat box to send messages in order to do this.

How to play with specific friends

If you want to play with a specific group of friends instead of waiting for random internet people, you can create a special address for the website. You can just type gemelo.org/en followed by a question mark and then the name of your room. If you give the other players this address you can start the game with just them. For example:

http://gemelo.org/en?my-secret-group

Github

The source code for the website is available on Github.