Julie's Boggle

The other day, while is a slightly random frame of mind, I googled for “Boggle” — a game I remembered being given as a birthday present when I was about 10.

I used to find this game a little dull as a child, so I vaguely wondered if I’d been missing anything.

The Boggle I owned came with 16 dice with a letter printed on each side. You would shake these dice around in their little plastic box and then rattle it a bit more to allow them to fall into the 16 die-shaped spaces in the base. From there, I recall you had a 3-minute timer to create as many words as you could out of the visible letters.

From the search results, I found a site where some bright chap has recreated Boggle on the web. (Except he won’t call it Boggle because he’s worried that Hasbro will come after him with a big legal stick. )

It turns out that this version of Boggle is a LOT more fun. For starters, you get to play against lots of other people on the internet. And as an added bonus, after each round finishes, a computer works out all the words that were possible with those letters — so you feel continually challenged about all the words that you missed!

One other rule that had slipped my mind was that, to make a word, you have to jump, horizontally, vertically or diagonally, from letter to letter. And you can only jump to an adjacent letter.

Anyhoo, Tom and I have been wasting passing lots of time on this slightly addictive site, on evenings when we’re feeling alert and all out of DVD’s to watch.

To you start off, you pick either the 4×4 board or a 5×5 board. Then it’s just a question of typing in words as as fast as you see them and getting scored for valid ones. Each game is just 3 minutes long and you have about a half-minute breather between rounds to look at all the words you failed to see and kick yourself for not seeing them.

So for example, in the board above, I found GRIN quite easily, but completely missed the opportunity for PRATTLER or TARTANS… And they were right there all along!