Boggle

Boggle is a popular word game played with a plastic grid made of lettered dice. Allan Turoff designed this game and it is trademarked by the game manufacturing brand Parker Brothers. In Boggle, the players have the task of finding words in the letters arranged in an adjacent sequence.

Boggle Rules

At the start of the game, a covered tray consisting of 16 cubic dice is shaken to arrange the dice in a proper sequence. Each side of the dice has a printed letter. Only the letter printed on the top surface of each die is visible as a 4x4 tray is used for settling the dice. Once all the dice are set properly on the grid, the players start looking for words together. They have three minutes to find as many words as possible. A 3-minute sand timer is set to keep track of the time.

The players try to construct words from the letters printed on the top surface of the adjacent dice. They are allowed to look for words in the cubes that are vertically horizontally or diagonally arranged. The words must have at least 3 letters. The singular, plural and other derived forms of a word are allowed in the game. However, the players are not allowed to employ the same letter dice twice in a single word. Each player uses a sheet of paper to record his or her constructed words from the letters printed on the dice. All the players must stop writing at once when the three minutes are up.

The score of each player is calculated once the game is over. The players have to read the words aloud from his or her word list during scoring. If the same word is written by 2 or more players, it is struck off all the lists. The validity of any word in a player's list may be challenged by another player. In these cases, the word is verified using a dictionary. The score is calculated once all the duplicate and invalid words have been removed from the lists of the players. Points are awarded depending on the letters in each word. The player with the highest points wins the game. The number of longest words is taken into account in case the score is tied.

There is a cube in Boggle printed with "Qu". In English words, "Q" is almost always followed by a "U". So, if there is a dice with "Q" on the grid, one would not be able to use it if there is no "U" beside it. Due to this reason, these two letters are printed together. The "Q" and "U" are counted as two different letters during scoring.

The OSPD or Official Scrabble Players Dictionary is published by the North American National Scrabble Association. It can also be used by Boggle players. All the words and their variants that contain a maximum of 8 letters are included in this dictionary. A puzzle book named "100 Boggle Puzzles (Improve Your Game)" was published in United Kingdom in the year 2003. The book contained 100 game positions for Boggle. However, this book is not in print any more.