🌹 Spellcast Solver

The strongest Discord Spellcast engine in the world (probably).

The program is able to find the best moves on any Spellcast board and supports:

• Tile boosts like double word and letter score etc.
• Frozen tiles for use in the Adventure mode
• Moves that use 1 to 3 tile swaps
• Trading points for gems for a long-term advantage
• Recommending shuffling on low-scoring boards

📈 Results

• 2v2's mode team score world record holder with 605 points
• 2v2's game between 4 engines: world record total combined score of 1,206 points
• High score achieved in solo games of 356 points
• Average score of 57 points per 1-swap move, 74 points for 2 swaps

🚀 Running

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+ installed (older ones should be okay too)
• Basic experience with using a terminal

Setup

• Use a terminal to cd to the project directory.
• Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install the necessary dependencies.

Editing the board file

The state of the Spellcast board is stored in board.txt and you will need to edit it such that it matches the board in your game. Here is an example board file:

t*jfel
i!engv#
tan+lr
iy!nim
n+audo$!
6
3

Letters with $ after them are double word score.
Letters with + after them are double letter score.
Letters with * after them are triple letter score.
Letters with # after them are frozen (cannot be used).
Letters with ! after them have a gem attached. If you have gem management disabled, you can ignore this.

You can chain modifiers if you want; e.g t+$ for a T tile with double letter score and double word score at the same time.

There are two numbers that go at the bottom of the file. The first is the number of gems that you have in the position, and the second is the round number. The round number will only be used when gem management is enabled, so you can omit this if you have it disabled.

Configuration

There is a configuration file config.json where you can edit the bot's settings.

movesShown The number of top moves that are shown.
gemManagement Toggles a gem management algorithm that when enabled will recommend moves that score less to collect more gems if it thinks you'll likely profit in the long term.
prettyPrint For each move, shows a 5x5 board that highlights the move. Swaps are marked in red.

Running

Once you have configured your board file, you can run the program with python main.py. You will be given the best moves in the position and the co-ordinates of any swaps necessary to play the move.

Improving performance

Searching for moves on a Spellcast board, especially those that require 2 or 3 swaps to execute, can take a significant amount of time because of the sheer number of combinations that need checking. I personally recommend that you use an alternative Python runtime like PyPy when using the solver in a real-world situation; it can sometimes improve performance by around 7x. Please note that you are not able to run the benchmarks using PyPy.

📊 Benchmarking

There is a script called benchmark.py which you can use to run various benchmarks for the solver. It takes one command-line argument which is the type of benchmark you want to run; this can be one of the following values:

• boards Generates a specified number of random Spellcast boards, and finds the top move on them. Provides data on the average score per move, average gems received etc.
• games Generates a specified number of entire Spellcast games. An initial random board is created, and the top moves are simulated therein.

You can configure each benchmark by going into the src/benchmarks folder, finding the script behind the particular benchmark and editing the configuration variables at the top of the file.