Evil Hangman (Rust)

An implementation of Evil Hangman written in Rust.
In evil hangman, the computer doesn’t pick a word up front — it keeps changing the word pool to maximize difficulty until forced to commit.

How It Works

• The game loads a dictionary of words from data/dictionary.txt.
• You choose:
  • The word length.
  • The number of guesses.
  • Whether you’d like to see the number of possible words remaining.
• After each guess:
  • The program partitions the remaining possible words into families (patterns of revealed letters and underscores).
  • It then chooses the largest family, keeping as many opportunities hidden as possible.
• You win if you guess the full word before running out of guesses.
• If not, the game reveals the "final" word from the remaining family.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Rust (latest stable recommended)
• Cargo (comes with Rust)

Build & Run

Clone the repository and run the game:

git clone https://github.com/EyeBrawler/evil-hangman-rust.git
cd evil-hangman-rust
cargo run

Example Gameplay

Loaded 127142 words.
Enter the number of letters you would like in the guessing word: 5
Enter the number of guesses you would like to have: 6
Would you like to display a running total of words remaining?: yes

Guesses Remaining: 6
Words Remaining: 1245
Used Letters:
Word: _____
Your guess?: e

Guesses Remaining: 5
Words Remaining: 643
Used Letters: e
Word: ___e_
...

Features

• Dictionary-driven gameplay (easily swap out your own dictionary.txt).
• Dynamic word families to keep the game difficult.
• Input validation (no repeated guesses, only single alphabetic characters).
• Option to display the number of words still in play.
• Replay support.

Dictionary

The game expects a file at:

data/dictionary.txt

This should be a plain text file with one word per line. You can replace it with your own word list to customize gameplay.

Project Structure

.
├── src
│   ├── main.rs
│   └── word_families.rs
├── data
│   └── dictionary.txt
└── Cargo.toml

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0).

You are free to use, modify, and distribute this software, but any derivative work must also be licensed under the GPL-3.0.

See the LICENSE file for the full text.