Lexicon

Lexicon is a deckbuilder where the cards are letters.

You own a deck of 52 letter cards. Each round deals a hand and a target score; you spell words to beat it. Between rounds you spend your winnings on relics that rewrite the scoring rules and on edits to the deck itself.

Score is chips times mult. A word's length sets both, and length matters far more than the letters do — a long ordinary word beats a short expensive one nearly every time. Thirty-three relics feed one of those two halves, or multiply the result. Blue adds chips. Red adds mult. Purple multiplies the mult, and the purple ones are what make six-figure scores possible, which is why there are few of them and they are expensive.

Cut your deck to pieces. Scissors are the cheapest thing in the shop, on purpose. Removing your Q, your Z and your V improves every hand you will draw for the rest of the run. It is the strongest thing you can do and the easiest to overlook — a deck eight dead cards lighter scores 42% more per round, and that number is measured, not asserted.

Every third round is a boss that bends one rule: vowels score no chips, words must be five letters or more, no letter twice, your most-played letter is debuffed. Twelve of them, eight antes, drawn without replacement — so no single run meets them all.

Type the word and the cards arrange themselves. A free hint gives you the longest word in hand, which is not always the best-scoring one.

Built for a desk. No sound at all. No timers, the pressure is the target, not a clock. It saves after every single action, so closing the window mid-word costs nothing, and it runs on a remote desktop without turning into a slideshow.

Gentle, for a break rather than a puzzle. Set Difficulty to Gentle and every round gives you four plays, and the first antes ask for half as much, easing back to the full ladder by ante 5.

Four- and five-letter words clear the early antes. Gentle runs keep their own best runs.

A place to stop. When a boss falls the run rests, saved, before the shop: stop there and it opens on the same screen next time, or carry on to the next ante.