Scott on Writing

Musings on technical writing...

Boggle, Anyone?

My immediate and extended family enjoys playing games, and one of the favorites is Boggle. Boggle is a word game trademarked by Parker Brothers and Hasbro that involves several players trying to find as many words as they can in a 4x4 grid of letters. At the end of the game, players compare the words they found. During this comparison I've always wondered what words we may have missed. Was there some elusive 10-letter word that no one unearthed? Did we only discover 25 solutions when there were 200 or more?

To answer this question that plagues every completed Boggle game, I created a simple Boggle solver (using, of course, ASP.NET 3.5 and C#). Enter in the tiles in each of the 16 cells of the 4x4 grid, and the Boggle solver will spit out all solutions in the puzzle. You can give this toy project a run at http://scottonwriting.net/Boggle/.

I've also written an article on this fun little project on 4Guys: Creating an Online Boggle Solver.

Boggle Solver!

Article: http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/040208-1.aspx
Live demo: http://scottonwriting.net/Boggle/
Complete source code: http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/code/BoggleSolver.zip

posted on Tuesday, April 01, 2008 2:35 PM

Feedback

# re: Boggle, Anyone? 4/2/2008 8:21 AM Dwayne J. Baldwin

http://scottonwriting.net/Boggle/EnterBoard.aspx?BoardID=reibtmfwiraerhst&Length=6

10-letter words
afterbirth, aftertimes, barretries, birthrates, breathiest, farrieries, firewaters, freshwater, fritterers, hermitries, sweetbriar, tertiaries, whitebaits, witherites

11-letter words
afterbirths, termitaries

It's nice to be sidetracked once in a while. Great article!

# re: Boggle, Anyone? 4/2/2008 10:59 PM Scott Mitchell

Dwayne, when I visit http://scottonwriting.net/Boggle/EnterBoard.aspx?BoardID=reibtmfwiraerhst&Length=6 I don't see any of those words.

Just:

emirate (5 pts)
emirates (11 pts)
farmer (3 pts)
framer (3 pts)
rawest (3 pts)
seamier (5 pts)
starter (5 pts)
steamer (5 pts)
steamier (11 pts)
tarter (3 pts)
warmer (3 pts)
wartime (5 pts)

# re: Boggle, Anyone? 4/8/2008 1:27 PM Scott Mitchell

The second (and final) part of this article series is now available:

Creating an Online Boggle Solver :: Solving the Puzzle
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/040908-1.aspx

# re: Boggle, Anyone? 4/9/2008 7:16 AM Dwayne J. Baldwin

Sorry, I posted the wrong link to find words...

http://www.puzzledepot.com/wordfinder2/scrabble.html

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