I’m the maintainer of the open source Lexica game, and am looking to make a Chinese version. However, I don’t speak any Chinese, and am unsure if it is even a sensible proposal to have this particular word game in Chinese.
If anybody here is interested, I’d be very thankful if you could download the game, play the English game for 1 minute to get an understanding for how it works, then comment on this issue (or this forum post) as to whether it makes sense to try to implement a Chinese version.
Just downloaded and played the game. I tried my best to image how it might work in Chinese context.
I doubt it makes any sense if users play it in English way, i.e. using Roman letters. For example: 你好=nǐ hǎo. As you can see, Chinese characters use tones.
Basically, the game is about building words with letters. For Chinese, the game could be localized to build words with Chinese characters. There are 24 letters, but there are 20k+ Chinese characters. So 4x4 and 5x5 game boards won’t work.
Word play in Chinese is a different game. How about building idioms or set phrases (most of which have just 4 characters) with limited Chinese characters so that they could fit in the 5x5 or 9x9 board? It might work, then we’ll have a new game, which clearly is not lexica any more.