Letter Punk is inspired by NYT’s Letter Boxed but is an original project: its own name, its own steampunk visual identity, its own code, and its own rules text — plus a genuinely new mechanic (double letters) that Letter Boxed doesn’t have. This document summarizes the reasoning behind that, in plain language.
New Game’s Letter (Punk) Boxed option fetches the day’s real board layout (12 letters, 4 sides) from third-party hints pages. This pulls in only the bare letter arrangement — a fact, not a creative expression — never NYT’s actual source code, visual design, or written copy; it’s the same category of thing a player could already do by hand-typing a board they saw somewhere else via New Game’s paste/manual-entry tools. Same reasoning as above, just automated. The button’s own name deliberately avoids reproducing “Letter Boxed” as a phrase, instead punning on it with the app’s own name.
Right above that button, a plain link reading “Play today’s NYT Letter Boxed” sends a player straight to the real puzzle at nytimes.com — this is the one place in the app that names “NYT” directly, and it’s the safest possible way to do it: a factual, nominative reference used only to point a player at NYT’s own site, not to describe or brand anything of Letter Punk’s own.
Letter Punk keeps the same core chaining rule as Letter Boxed (each letter must come from a different side of the board than the one before it), but adds double-letter support: tap a letter twice in a row to double it, which makes previously-impossible words like LOOK or BEEKEEPER playable. That’s a deliberate design choice, not a workaround — see the “Why Letter Punk Exists” section of the README for the full reasoning. As far as this project’s own research turned up, no other Letter-Boxed-style game implements this specific mechanic.
The same principle that let Letter Punk exist also limits what its own license can claim. The PolyForm Noncommercial License covers this project’s specific code, wording, and visual design — not the underlying word-chaining mechanic or the double-letter idea, neither of which was ever anyone’s to own. Someone is free to build their own independent word-chain game from scratch, noncommercial or commercial, without copying Letter Punk’s actual expression. For a noncommercial version, that’s simply welcome, no conflict there.
This summary reflects informal research (an AI-assisted web search, not a lawyer), done to sanity-check the project’s direction before building it — not a legal opinion. If Letter Punk is ever published or monetized at meaningful scale, an actual conversation with an intellectual-property attorney is the appropriate next step, not this document.
The original, unedited research conversation this summary is based on is preserved for reference at docs/archive/letter-boxed-copyright-research-transcript.md.