Harder combos, not more kinds of fruit

Five new combos now reward long words, reverse alphabetical streaks, no-turn streaks, and harder versions of two existing skills. The visible result is grape, melon, carrot, and starred fruit on the board. The more important result is a rule for extending the combo system without giving every harder feat a new fruit, a new name, and a new visual identity.

Decide the system before adding the fruit#

The original suggestion also included synonym and homonym combos, but the dictionary pipeline has no reliable data for either. The design grilling split the decision three ways: add weak data, postpone the whole set, or ship the five combos that need no new data source. We chose the third option and wrote the triggers, points, bilingual labels, tier rules, and hint order down before the agent touched the engine. That made implementation a translation of agreed rules rather than a sequence of guesses hidden inside code.

One star instead of another noun#

The existing combo feedback already gives each fruit several jobs: it needs a board icon, a colour, labels in both languages, an announcement, a game-log marker, and a share-card representation. Inventing a separate fruit for every advanced version would repeat that cost and make the relationship between the feats harder to see. A tier now keeps the base fruit, adds a star badge, and multiplies its value by 1.5. When a higher tier fires, it replaces the lower tier for that skill instead of stacking with it.

A harder version of the same skill should look related, not unrelated but more expensive.

The exploit found during design#

The no-turn streak initially sounded like three words without steering. That rule could be farmed with two-letter words along a straight edge for roughly 1,500 points, so the design review added a four-letter minimum before implementation began. On a board fifteen cells wide, that turns geometry into the limiting factor. The same review kept upgraded fruit out of the hint ladder: hints teach the base skill, while the star badge and help page explain that the skill can escalate.

Eight seams, one feature#

The agent built the change test-first across eight named seams, from streak counters and combo detection through spawning, saved duel-state compatibility, hints, announcements, and rendering. The final suite held 1,117 unit tests, and the recording scripts staged the new fruit in both languages so the result could be checked as play, not only as state. The next useful evidence will come from the game itself: whether players discover the starred tiers, whether the four-letter carrot rule is sufficient, and whether five new rewards add variety without making the board noisy.