Twenty-six little letters. Writing-wise, that’s all we’ve got to work with in this melting-pot of a language. But choose the right ones in the right combinations and you can create a masterpiece. We’re particularly proud of the letters Spell the Beans generates in each puzzle, and the effort that went into serving them up in that little oval window. Even the order the letters appear in has a moderate democracy to it. Not to give away any trade secrets, but simple corpora (however large), or certainly dictionaries that can’t be parsed by inflection (not sure any dictionary explicitly contains all inflections of all lemmas anyway),* would not be good starting points for arriving at useful frequencies. There are also easy-to-miss assumptions to avoid. We’re confident in saying that for a variety of reasons, letter frequencies commonly available on the Internet can’t match the relevance of what our system produces. This is RSTLNE on steroids. We hope you can play this game a long time and bask in that fine-tuned difference.
As stated elsewhere, there will be games where getting a good score will be difficult, and that is absolutely by design. You will sometimes see somewhat unusual combinations of letters. Trust us: We found that over the long haul, allowing for this makes for especially engaging gameplay.
By the way, the use of RSTLNE in a game that involves guessing commonly used words and phrases is absolutely on target for its purpose. Spell the Beans is about forming sequences of letters that do (or don’t) exist as entries in the English lexicon. Both have their relevance.
*Guess that makes it clear we made good use of other things…
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