I really, really enjoyed watching you play my game. You clearly know what making a word game entails and brought real insights.
To answer a few of your questions:
- the Priscella who dominates the Leaderboard is my mom. Of all the dozens of games I've made, this is her favourite. She plays every day after she Wordles.
- I used a dictionary of the 23110 seven-letter words culled from the 172820 word list on Peter Norvig's website. I would be curious to compare it with the one you mentioned.
- Yes, Bingo Buddy handles anagrams. If it wants GALLERY, but you find ALLERGY, you get full credit. It shows you're cool that you thought to ask that.
- I fully recognize that it is not unique enough to compete with similar games. My main goal in making it was to learn how to use a StreamReader to speed up processing large text files. On that measure, it was a success!
- It connects to the theme of "the odds are good" because when the jam started I was reading a book about Scrabble championships that mentioned that the odds of your first seven Scrabble tiles containing a word is 12.6%. I became interested in exploring the mathematics of how those odds would increase if one were allowed a single swap of any number of tiles of your choice. My hunch is that for expert level players, just one swap would make the odds quite good. Allowing a single swap wasn't a fun game for non-experts, though, so I upped it to ten.