The NY Times Spelling Bee game is part of its Crossword section. The player must form words using a set of only seven letters, of which one letter must be included. Letters may be repeated in the word. The more words you find (and the longer they are), the higher your score.

Spelling Wasp is a clone of Spelling Bee, which lets you have some additional control over the configuration and dictionary. You can even play it in other languages, as long as you have a word list for that language (for now only ASCII characters are supported). What's more, you can play new puzzles as often as you like.

python3 spelling_wasp.py # play with default settings
python3 spelling_wasp.py -h # help message and full option list
python3 spelling_wasp.py -f # play in fullscreen mode
python3 spelling_wasp.py --dict my_dictionary.txt # specify your own word list

By default looks in /usr/share/dict/words for a word list. However the default word lists that ship with your OS may not be very good.

An alternative is the SOWPODS word list (download link), but you will have to remove the first few lines of explanatory text from the file.

To play the full screen mode you will need the curses module in Python. This should be bundled by default in Linux and Mac OS X, but on Windows you may have to install windows-curses by yourself first.

• Support characters beyond the ASCII set, for other languages
• Add some kind of evaluation to scoring system, and ask user if they want to continue beyond 100 points
• Bonus points when correctly guessed word contains all the letters
• Save the game results to a log file
• Add colors to the interface
• Give hints
• Progress bar
• Ask confirmation before quitting
• Fix bug when list of words guessed /unguessed longer than screen