Boggle
Boggle is a word game designed by Allan
Turoff and trademarked by Parker Brothers and Hasbro. The game is
played using a grid of lettered dice, in which players attempt to
find words in sequences of adjacent letters.
The game begins by shaking a covered
tray of sixteen cubic dice, each with a different letter printed on
each of its sides. The dice settle into a four by four tray so that
only the top letter of each cube is visible. After they have
settled into the grid, a three-minute timer is started and all
players simultaneously begin the main phase of play.
Each player searches for words that can
be constructed from the letters of sequentially adjacent cubes,
where "adjacent" cubes are those horizontally, vertically or
diagonally neighboring. Words must be at least three letters long,
may include singular and plural (or other derived forms)
separately, but may not use the same letter cube more than once per
word. Each player records all the words he or she finds by writing
on a private sheet of paper. After three minutes have elapsed, all
players must stop writing and the game enters the scoring
phase.
In the scoring phase, each player reads
off his or her list of discovered words. If two or more players
wrote the same word, it is removed from all players' lists. Any
player may challenge the validity of a word, in which case a
previously nominated dictionary is used to verify or refute it. For
all words remaining after duplicates have been eliminated, points
are awarded based on the length of the word. The winner is the
player whose point total is highest, with any ties typically broken
by count of long words.
One cube is printed with Qu. This is
because Q is virtually always followed by U in English words (see
exceptions), and if there were a Q in Boggle, it would be unusable
if a U did not, by chance, appear next to it. For the purposes of
scoring Qu counts as two letters: squid would score two points (for
a five-letter word) despite being formed from a chain of only four
cubes.
The North American National Scrabble
Association publishes the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary
(OSPD), which is also suitable for Boggle. This dictionary includes
all variant forms of words up to eight letters in length. A puzzle
book entitled 100 Boggle Puzzles (Improve Your Game) offering 100
game positions was published in the UK in 2003 but is no longer in
print.
Word Length
Points
3
1
4
1
5
2
6
3
7
5
8+
11
Different versions of Boggle have
varying distributions of letters. For example, a more modern
version (with a blue box) in the UK has easier letters, such as
only one "K", but an older version (with a yellow box, from 1986)
has two "K"s and a generally more awkward letter
distribution.
Using the sixteen cubes in a standard
Boggle set, the list of longest words that can be formed includes
Inconsequentially, Quadricentennials, and Sesquicentennials, all
seventeen letter words made possible by Q and U appearing on the
same face of one cube.
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