Quackle

The main strength of Quackle is in extremely thorough analysis of games of "SCRABBLE® Brand Crossword Game" or variants thereof. For example if I want to know what is a good move to make from an opening rack of BEFIMNS, it will give me a full table of different choices for the play. I can just click 'Ask Championship Player' and get a simple list of plays ranked by several important measures involving estimated average future advantage in points, rack leave, and winning probability. If I want to know more I can choose moves for simulation and simulate the future of the game for 1 play in the future, or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or all the way to the end of the game. Quackle then informs me the estimated average score, rack leave value, bingo percentage, and approximated winning percentage for every step of the game into the future, based on that simulation. (FIB or FEM or exchange MB is a smarter play than FINES, I know for sure now.) A beautiful feature of Quackle is its ability to play with any lexicon or alphabet. For user experience, it has some rough spots. One tricky part is to set up the bonus squares, which is not too hard if you can find the "Settings" tab next to "History" and "Choices". The tricky part here is to cycle past the 4x letter bonus (which is a lavender color) and the 4x word bonus (which is an orangy color). The "horizontal symmetry" and "vertical symmetry" buttons make it go faster. There is a helpful Quackle user group on groups.yahoo.com. It helps to search it first before you ask. Please ignore the posts from the biker chick. Due to the biker chick perhaps, apparently attachments aren't allowed in the group when you answer a question there. There are some issues with version 0.96 which are being fixed in the patchsets in the CVS repository, but you'd have to compile Quackle on your own to get the advantages of these fixes. You may be able to get a newer XP compatible release from someone, but I haven't located a source yet. One issue has to do with reporting (at least) of evaluation scores in the endgame, and another issue has to do with clearing enough of the variables when going from a Simulation back to Ask Championship Player (this can be worked around by changing the rack, starting a simulation I guess for good luck, then change back and Ask Championship Player. This tricks the silly computer into thinking it is analyzing from scratch.) If you can deal with all that then Quackle is the best program ever! - Reviewed 10/22/2010.