Took this exercise way too far and had a lot of fun with it.

• Just pynput <- Warning this does legit take control of your keyboard so make sure to exit the game with "q" when you're done.

Note: Eventually, I may add some command-line flags so that you can say how big of a board you want and if you want to load a pre-existing board

• If using pip

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 main.py

• if using uv

uv run main.py

The keyboard controls are are based on vim keybindings, but I display them beneath the board so they're easy to remember.

Cascading crushes of letters (i.e. crushes that happen after their supporting letters have dropped) are rewarded more points than non-cascading crushes.

• At some point, maybe I'll colorize the board and make it more animated
  • See letters drop, change their color in the case of matching, make it evident how many points you added, etc.
• A possibly fun extension of this would be to actually make a game server for this
  • This would be a big extension, and the game mechanics in their current state aren't fun enough to warrant it
  • Making it multiplayer with things like bombs, bricks, turn stealing, etc, could maybe make it worth it
  • Might also be cool to make it support multiple clients (TUI and Browser)
  • Would likely require persisting the game state
  • Another angle could be making the board arbitrarily large and having an infinite number of players

Anyways, this was fun.