Article Surfing Archive

With so much online games available on the web today, who would ever thought that Boggle would not be among them? Mind and educational games are a worthy pastime for people today. While others are looking for the usual arcade or role playing games, there are some who also look for these logical and witty games today. And mind you, it is addicting!

Boggle is a word game played by two or more players. Points are earned for finding words in a 4x4 grid of letters.

Play starts by randomly displaying 16 letter cubes, arranged in a 4x4 grid. A 3-minute timer is started and then each player simultaneously, secretly, writes down all the words he or she finds of three or more letters in length. Words are formed from letters that adjoin horizontally, vertically or diagonally to the immediate left, right, or up-and-down. No letter may be used more than once within a single word.

When the allotted time is up (three minutes, but players may agree beforehand to allow for more time) all players stop writing. Each player in turn then reads his/her list aloud. Any word that appears in more than one players list is crossed off ALL lists -- NO ONE gets credit for it.

The winner is the player who earns the most points after a predetermined number of rounds or when a predetermined score has been reached.

Individuals who are good at solving anagram-type puzzles will find themselves right at home with Boggle.

Note that the better Boggle player is not necessarily the one with the larger vocabulary (although a large vocabulary can never hurt) but is the one who is simply better at anagramming words from a mess of jumbled letters. Compare this difference to Scrabble. A large vocabulary and the ability to anagram words is also important in Scrabble, but playing Scrabble forces me to make decisions on what words to play.

The highest scoring play you can find in Scrabble is often NOT your best play, especially if it leaves you with an undesirable combination of letters in your rack, or opens up a potential higher scoring play for your opponent. Thus, in Scrabble, often your second highest scoring play may actually be best. Also, there are many other decisions in Scrabble: Should I pass, should I should play a known phoney, should I play a potential phoney, should I challenge a potential phoney, should I pass my turn and go fishing for a certain letter or letters, etc. As mentioned above, none of these decisions exist in Boggle.

In 'Boggle', one of the drawbacks of other word games (e.g. Scrabble) is resolved : there is no downtime. All players are simultaneously playing. The other great thing about Boggle is that no matter how long you stare at the grid, another players has always found a word, you didn't see.

'Boggle' is a fun word game. Due to the time element and the simultaneous play, it is nothing like the well-known Scrabble. This makes Boggle a short filler, that can be played in almost any group, even with people that normally don't like word games. But don't expect any tactics or strategy.