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Prevent daily games from having an excessive amount of wordsΒ #23

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@hacknug

Because of how Spanish handles verbs, ?date=2026-01-24&lang=es resulted in a game of 1181 words. I don't think the game was designed with something like this in mind haha

To ensure finishing a game is something achievable in all languages (at the end of the day this is why we have daily puzzles, not monthly lol), I would like to propose adding a feature that allows us to ignore a set of given flags for each locale.

You can find a list of all the flags and rules the game unmunches here: https://github.com/sbosio/rla-es/blob/master/ortografia/afijos/afijos.txt

Note that that is +7000 loc for verbs-only and 500 for everything else. Yay Spanish! πŸŽ‰

I have part of the proposed solution here keeping only the infinitive form of all verbs. It can't be merged as is, as the change would, at least, mess with historic data and cached dictionaries. Perhaps we could/should introduce versioning of these dictionaries?

With the proposed changes, ?date=2026-01-24&lang=es would go down from 1181 to 249 words (tested by hardcoding const letters = ["P","E","A","G","N","D","R"]). Other relevant numbers:

current proposal
expanded words 655708 117514
proper nouns 911 911
extracted words 652693 114618
pangrams 26066 9802
?date=2026-01-24&lang=es 1181 249

Please note the flags were extracted by an LLM so there might be some errors there.

I'm open to making changes to the proposed values for the ignoredFlags array, although I'd like to focus this issue more on the groundwork needed to do that.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this πŸ‘

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