PiecepackWordGames

RonHaleEvans
Version 210214

Here are some guidelines for creating letter-by-letter wordgames such as LiquidCrystals or DisappearingSpell with the Sixteen Segments piecepack game subsystem. Your game does not have to use these! They are meant to be a starting point, not the end.

Tiles: Words in SixteenSegments word games are created by placing PiecepackMatchsticks on the backs of piecepack tiles, mimicking 16-segment electronic displays (see below). Tile edges represent the outer segments of the displays. You can imagine the diagonal segments.

Sticks in use: The grid side of each piecepack tile can hold at most one character (letter, number, or special character such as punctuation). Characters are composed of piecepack matchsticks with the following values: Ace (short orthogonal), 2 (short diagonal), 3 (long orthogonal), 5 (long diagonal), and Null (dot, period, or decimal point).

Thus, you can use all piecepack matchsticks except value 4 to create characters. Value 4 is the "knight's move" stick that has no counterpart on the display. You can use these for another purpose, such as tracking money or victory points.

The six piecepack matchsticks (from top left: N, A, 2, 3, 4, 5). Matchstick 4 is not used.

Available characters: The table below lists all acceptable characters in SixteenSegments games. Some games may have even stricter limitations, such as using only capital letters, or only hyphens (-) and apostrophes (') as special characters in words.

Consult an ASCII chart if you're having trouble recognizing some of the characters.

All printable ASCII characters on a 16-segment display (click image for more detail)

Seventeenth segment: You may notice in this chart that some characters use a dot to the lower right, particularly the period (.), decimal point, exclamation point (!), question mark (?), and so on. You can consider this a 17th segment, and you can represent it with a Null stick to the lower right of a tile.

The dot is also useful to distinguish a lower-case x from an upper-case X if you are playing with lower-case letters. (In the table above, they are the same.)

Long sticks: You can (and in some games must) substitute a long stick for two short sticks of the same kind (orthogonal or diagonal), if the long pieces do not cross any other long pieces. For example, you may make an X out of one long and two short diagonals, but not two long diagonals.

Dictionaries: Players may agree on any references as an authority for their game. It's also suggested during guessing games that the words be something that all players are likely to know. For more guidelines on acceptable words, see the Games page on the Alpha Word Game System wiki.

Image Credits

Six piecepack matchsticks, by Dan Burkey, from the PiecepackMatchsticks page on this wiki

LED Segment ASCII Library by Dave Madison, via GitHub