Long story short - I might be.
I built this app because my friends refuse to play Bananagrams with me anymore.
If you don’t know what bananagrams is, it is an incredibly fast version of Scrabble against friends where you are each building your own crossword from scratch very quickly - adding one tile at a time to your crossword until the bag is finished.
Basically, I became so good at this game that I ended up never losing a game for the next five years. Eventually, I wasn’t able to play at all! Nobody wanted to play to lose.
I looked everywhere for a digital version that rewarded high-speed play and was truly competitive. Nothing high-quality at all existed.
So I spent the last few months building Speedgrams.
The most important features:
• Ranked Matchmaking: I built a global ELO-style ladder specifically to find the other "sweaty" word players out there. At the top level, an entire game could be finished in a minute!
• Real-Time Multiplayer: You can jump into a head-to-head match with a friend in seconds. It brings out a level of competitive "toxicity" and bragging rights that I haven't found in any other word game.
• Master Rank Gameplay: The video attached is me playing in Master Rank. I’m currently #1 on the leaderboard (admittedly, it’s a small pool of about 50 users right now), and I’m genuinely waiting for a challenger to take me off my throne.
It’s just you, the clock, and the tiles.
The flow works like this:
The Scramble: You get a set of tiles and must build a connected grid of words as fast as possible.
The "Draw": Every time you finish your tiles, you "Draw" and everyone in the match gets a new tile added to their pile.
The Finish: The first person to use all their tiles and click "Done" wins.
I also brought in power ups to reward fast players
I just launched on the App Store for iOS. I’m at the point where I need real humans to break the ranking algorithm and tell me if the UI is intuitive.
[App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/speedgrams-ranked-word-game/id6759176117)
I’m happy to answer any questions about the dev process or the ranking system. I look forward to being knocked off the top of the leaderboard!