scrabblebag

What is scrabblebag and what is it for?

scrabblebag is a Holochain project for playing Scrabble with physical boards while the players are apart. It provides a shared, hidden virtual tile bag and hand tracker so players can draw letters and record each other's plays without their tiles going out of sync.

The repository's README records the project's early purpose: its author wanted to play multiplayer Scrabble with someone remotely over a video call while each player used a physical board, and found that the tile bag and the players' hands kept slipping out of sync when they were tracked by hand. The project was written to hold the parts of the game the players cannot see, so the physical board and rack could stay in use.

Scrabble hides information: no player knows the contents of another's hand or of the bag. That is what makes a remote game on two separate boards hard, because both boards must agree on which letters have been drawn. The project's site presents one shared page showing every player's name with the bag in the middle, and a player's hand when you click their name, so the group sees the same draws at the same time.

In the workflow its site describes, you place a word on your physical board and then play the same tiles on the page; when an opponent plays, you rebuild their word from your own bag; when you draw, you take out the physical tiles shown. The project's documentation is the repository README and scrabblebag.org, and the README describes a self-hosted Node.js server rather than a packaged app. hAppRadar's September 2026 census records the activity as stalled, with the most recent recorded push in March 2022.

From 2 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.