📋 How do you remember all the rules, before and during the game? Meet the Game rules button

A LexiSmash room can be set up in countless ways: points to win, time per round, starting letters, the cost of extra letters, the Wild Tile, the Speed Bonus, special words, private letters that stay or get used up, and rules that change depending on your position on the leaderboard. That freedom is exactly what makes every game night different, but it brings a small problem: whoever joins a room doesn’t always know which rules they’re about to play with. So, while waiting for the Master to start the game, the questions fly: how many points do we need? Can we buy letters? Is the Wild Tile on?

How it works

Starting today, on the waiting screen you see after joining a room (for example by scanning the QR code), there’s a new button under the hourglass: “📋 Game rules”. Tapping it opens a box with the full summary of the room’s rules, in the same form already used by the lobby and the preset modes: scoring system, points to win, time per round, starting letters, the cost and type of extra letters, and then only the optional rules that are actually turned on. If a rule is off, it doesn’t appear: no endless lists to scroll through.

The button is available both on the player screen and in Integrated Mode, where it sits in the card at the top with the room name and the game status. The box closes with the OK button or by tapping outside it, and it also closes by itself the moment the Master starts the game: nobody gets stuck on the reminder while the others start drawing. The button only appears when the room is really waiting, that is, when the rules have been decided: while the Master is still preparing them, it stays hidden.

During the game too

The reminder doesn’t disappear once the game starts. On the player’s phone and in Integrated Mode, throughout the game, a small 📋 button appears in the bottom-left corner and stays put even while you scroll: tap it to reopen the same summary at any time. During play the box doesn’t close by itself: you open it when you need it and close it yourself, with OK or by tapping outside, without a change of phase snatching it away while you’re reading.

The Monitor, the big screen everyone uses to follow the board, also has its own “📋 Game rules” button, after its other controls: handy when someone asks about a rule out loud and the answer needs to be shown to everyone. And the reminder helps the Master too: at the end of the room settings there’s a new switch, “📋 Rules reminder for the Master”, off by default. Turn it on and during the game you’ll find the rules button at the end of the game controls, or fixed in the bottom-left corner if you’re also playing in Integrated Mode. Like every other setting, it’s saved in your configurations.

Rules that change with the leaderboard

The most useful part covers the Leaderboard Modifiers, the rules the Master can assign to a single position: for example making extra letters more expensive for whoever is in the lead, or giving more words per turn to whoever is last. In the summary these rules are described in detail, one card per position, with every value: which position it concerns, which rule changes and how. A short explanation also reminds everyone how it works: each player uses the rules of the position they hold, the leaderboard is recalculated at the end of every round and applies to the next one, and players with the same points share the same position. During the game, on each player’s phone the card that applies to them in that round is highlighted in yellow with the words “👉 This round, these rules apply to you”; if no position applies to them, the box says so clearly. On the Monitor and for the Master, all positions are shown without highlighting.

A concrete example

Picture an evening with eight friends. The Master sets up a 300-point room with the Wild Tile on and Leaderboard Modifiers: whoever is first pays 20 points for each extra letter, whoever is last can write up to three words per turn. Before, the last person to arrive found out only once the game had started, perhaps after trying to buy a letter. Now, while waiting for the latecomers, everyone opens “Game rules” and already knows what to expect: whoever aims to stay in the lead knows extra letters will cost them, and whoever is behind knows they have a chance to catch up.

A practical tip

If you’re the Master, take a look at the summary from a player’s phone yourself before starting: it’s the quickest way to check you haven’t forgotten a rule left on from a previous game. And if you want to dig deeper into how points are calculated and which strategies work best, you’ll find everything on the Rules and strategies page.