GMTK 2025 – Scrabbaloop
Friday, August 8th, 2025
This Scrabble inspired game was my entry to the 2025 GMTK Games Jam. Due to the limited time, it’s missing a lot of polish and features, but it is basically functional. Barely!
The theme for this year was “Loops”, and I wondered what Scrabble would be like if you played on a hex-grid, and only scored if you formed a loop with existing words. And if everyone played on a globally shared board, and you could play at any time. With no limits on tiles either!
Anyway, to play click the link below, and put it into full-screen. Drag the board to scroll around, mouse wheel zooms in/out. Type in your word and drag it into position, right-click while dragging to change the direction of your word. You have to type the full word, and it must overlap at least one existing tile. If it makes any other words, they all have to be valid too.
For example, here I’m adding the word TREATIES, which doesn’t form any new loops. This won’t score, but it will set me up for my next word…
…CENTER. This scores my added word, including a double letter bonus on the R. It also scores TREATIES and ENTER.
I wanted to add the following features, but ran out of time:
- Leaderboard and personal rank. Actually, I got the back-end of this done, and you can see it in json format here. Use a prettifier to make it readable: Leaderboard.json
- Reject repeated words. If you look at the top-right, you can see someone has found an exploit where they can loop XXX endlessly. You should be able to do that, once. Again, I set up the server database to easily add this, but didn’t get round to the game side
- Realtime feedback while dragging your proposed word. I had this working most of the way through the event. I added a switch to turn it off as it made it very hard to debug while building. My plan was to turn it back on at the end, which I did. Sadly it started corrupting the DB! So I was forced to turn it back off
- Way more feedback about scores
- Sound/music
- Loads more polish in general
Anyway, time makes fools of us all, and I had to submit it before the strict deadline. I doubt I’ll go back and add these features. The concept isn’t really all that much fun, mainly because hex grids are bad for Scrabble-style word games. You have to ignore 2-letter words as you make them with most of the new words. You get a lot of accidental 3-letter words too.

This minimal multiplayer online game was built in 48 hours as my entry into the 








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