Building a Letter Boxed‑Style Word Puzzle with Laravel Architecture & Feedback

Hi everyone 👋

I’ve recently been working on a project inspired by the Letter Boxed word game (the NYT puzzle where you create the shortest possible word chain using all given letters). I decided to build my own version as a web app using Laravel and would love to get some feedback on architecture and best practices.

Here’s a quick summary of what I’m trying to build:

🔹 A daily puzzle generator that shows a set of letters 🔹 Users can submit solutions — each must follow the Letter Boxed rules 🔹 Store submitted solutions in a database 🔹 Validate word rules server‑side for correctness 🔹 Display leaderboards (fewest words, fastest solves)

I’ve got a working prototype, and I’m tracking progress and pattern analysis on my site here: https://lettersboxdanswers.com/

Right now I’m debating the best way to structure the core logic:

📌 Questions for the community:

Puzzle generation: Should I pre‑generate daily puzzles and store them, or generate on the fly with caching?

Rule validation: What’s the Laravel‑idiomatic way to validate word chains — custom rule objects, services, or jobs?

Database design: Has anyone modeled similar puzzle games? Would you store individual letter positions or just the submitted string + metadata?

Performance: If this scales, would you recommend broadcasting live leaderboards via Laravel Echo / WebSockets?

Right now I’m using:

• Laravel 10 • MySQL • Tailwind + Livewire for interactivity • Jobs + Queues for validation

Any architecture advice, refactoring tips, or performance insights would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance 🙌

If you want, I can also draft sampl