Literati is a popular word game in the spirit of Scrabble^«, Wordful, eWords and others.

The Beiks version of Literati for Palm OS is a single player game and allows any words to be used on the board, including names, verb forms, singular and plural forms etc. Although the benefit of allowing word forms can be questionable, we believe it keeps the game closer to its original idea - knowing and using as many words from the language as possible.

Allowing any valid words and forms is also a big challenge to the word library that the game uses and although we have done our best to secure a truly remarkable spellchecking database, be prepared to surprise it. And when you do, you may claim yourself literati ;-)

Literati can be installed and played on any device running Palm OS 3.5 or higher. The game may come in either ZIP format ("Literati.ZIP") or Windows executable format ("Literati.EXE"). When using ZIP format, regardless whether on MacOS, Windows or any other host platform, the necessary installation files are located in the "Programs" folder from the compressed ZIP file.

Also, there are two important topics you may want to be aware of:

Graphical databases (Skins)

Since some Palm OS devices have better display resolution than others, Literati has adopted the approach of having different graphical databases (skins). Having different skins (files) for the different resolutions is a great way of providing the best possible quality for every device on the market while saving as much memory as possible. The only drawback of this approach is that the customer has to know what the resolution of their device is and install the according file.

Typically, the game itself will indicate you if it is happy with the installed skin file or not. If it is not, then you should reinstall it with different selection (for EXE files) or manually install different skin file from the Skins folder (for ZIP files). Refer to your device's manual regarding its display resolution or ask us at support@beiks.com.

As of version 1.2 of the game, the graphical database files can not be installed on external media cards (CF, SD) - they must be in RAM; future game releases will address this limitation.

Word lists

Literati uses the LexLib spellchecking library to provide words lookup. As of its first public release, this library does not allow the word database files to be located at external media cards (CF, SD) due to speed concerns. Future releases of the engine may address this limitation.

See the revision history table below for more details.

The game starts with a single letter placed in the center of the playing board.

The player arranges letters in turns so that new words are assembled. A new word is a word in horizontal (left to right) or vertical (top to bottom) direction, which contains at least one "old" and one "new" letter. Old letters are all letters from the board before the start of the player's turn; new letters are the letters that the player had added.

Each turn the player is given certain amount of letters he or she can put on the board. Any amount of these can be used in the turn. Unused letters remain for the next turn while the used ones are refilled with new, random letters for the next turn.

Sometimes a special "wildcard" character (displayed as a question mark) is given to the player, which can be assigned any desired letter. The player can do that by taping the question mark and holding the pen down until a pop-up keyboard prompts for selection of a character.

By placing a letter on the board the player can often create valid new word in one direction (e.g. horizontal), but invalid in the other. This is not allowed. If a letter is added, constructing new words in both directions, then both new words must be valid!

The game continues until the board gets full or until the player is unable to construct a new word.

Scoring

Upon completing letter placement, the player requests the game to validate his or her input by taping the GO button. Each recognized word in which the new letters take place brings the player points.

The points given for a word depend on the letters that construct it, their location on the board and the location of the word itself on the board.

First, the value of each letter is determined by the color of its tile. See the onboard game help for the exact values. (the white tiles with wildcards weight 1 point.)

Second, each letter's value can be multiplied by a factor determined by the place it was placed on. Letters placed on cells marked with "2L" or "3L" (indicated with letters "L" and "W" with two or three dots on low-resolution devices) will increase their value 2 or 3 times respectively.

Third, the whole word value can similarly be multiplied by a factor if any of its new letters are placed on a call marked with "2W" or "3W" (or "W" with two or three dots on low-resolution devices). The factor will be 2 or 3 respectively.

Finally, there is an extra bonus for placing all available letters for the turn.