Acacia

Acacia is ten puzzle games behind one tab bar: Wordler, Spelling Bee, Shikaku, Flow, Parking Jam, Water Sort, Gate Runner, Pull the Pin, Fusion Chamber and Bubble Shooter, plus a Letter Boxed solver. No dependencies, no build step, no framework—hand-written ES modules served as static files.

Why I Built It

It started as one game. The NYT Spelling Bee is a daily ritual, and "daily" is the catch—one puzzle and you're done—so I built an unlimited version on the real archive. Then it turned out the hard part of a puzzle game is never the rendering; it's knowing whether the puzzle you generated is any good. That question was interesting enough to keep asking about nine more games.

Real Puzzles, Real Physics

The Spelling Bee deals actual NYT puzzles from the official archive—793 of them, each with its exact accepted answer list, 8,333 unique words in total. Word acceptance matches what NYT accepted that day, and every puzzle has at least one pangram.

The generated games each own their difficulty argument. Water Sort refuses to deal a board its solver cannot prove solvable. Flow's puzzles are deliberately not uniquely solvable—that was measured, not assumed. Fusion Chamber is a small rigid-body physics engine whose bodies deliberately never sleep.

Architecture

Every game splits three ways: a config.js of tuning constants, a sim.js that is pure—no DOM, no storage, no clock, no Math.random, entropy only from a seeded RNG—and a ui.js that renders it. A lint test enforces that split by reading the source, so a seeded board replays identically in a browser and in Node.

That purity is what makes the rest possible. Balance sweeps play thousands of games headlessly and write their results to committed JSON, and each results file pins the constants its numbers justify: change a tuned constant without re-running its sweep and the suite fails, naming the constant and the date it was last measured. The tuning history is the git log of those files.

Features

• Ten games behind one generated tab bar, each remembering its own board and stats
• Wordler—six tries at a five-letter word, with a post-game solver that grades every guess against what the best available word would have cleared
• Spelling Bee with a Hints panel: the classic forum grid and two-letter list, live-updated to what you have not found
• A Letter Boxed solver that finds the shortest word chains from the official NYT dictionary
• 137 unit and lint tests that run in about a second, with nothing to install