I’ve had 10 letter words on the mind recently. After some digging, I can now report that there are only three combinations of ten letters that can be arranged into more than three different (Scrabble-kosher) words:
I have so far been unable to put this information to good use but have not given up on doing so.
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I think my latest puzzle is probably the my best so far, at least from a construction standpoint. And it’s not ugly. Click on through for instructions.
You might have noticed a link to a poorly thought-out word game blog on here a few weeks ago. Well that dream is dead. Replacing it is a slightly better thought-out word game site, which you can find at the above link. As far as word games go, I have a lot of training (tens of thousands of games of boggle on top of two years in grad school for linguistics), and I have confidence I can come up with some unique puzzles. But if you hate crossword puzzles, you might be better off reading a book or something.
Basically, I’ve got ungodly amounts of free time and can only play so much NBA Jam. So far, lying awake at night trying to think of words to remove L’s from has been a nice change of pace from the existential terrors that had previously been filling my head. As long as that’s the case, expect regular updates.
You should create a username so that I have some stats worth tracking. If things get going, I might offer up some sort of prize. I don’t really know what I’m doing, so some puzzles might be impossibly difficult.
There are five puzzles and two blog posts right now. Get in on the ground floor.
Last night, after learning of MCA’s death, I solemnly caught fire with the lost Beastie Boy in my game of NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, and this morning revisited Hello Nasty for the first time in possibly a decade.
I’ll admit that I’m not particularly good at distinguishing the voices of the Beastie Boys from each other (same is true of Clipse, and the members of The Pharcyde that aren’t Fat Lip), and a few minutes of google queries turned up nothing definitive, but I believe the Boggle community lost a member of its royal family. I am deeply saddened, and not just because it’s taken me this long to discover my favorite rap line ever.
[Update: real-life pal Andy has informed me that the above lyric is not from MCA but most likely Adrock. Which means: Long Live The King of Boggle!]
“Putting Shame in Your Game” (spotify link)
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It’s entirely possible I’m the only person on Tumblr who posts screen shots of the 11 letter words I find in boggle, which I don’t understand and makes me question my place in the world. Luckily, it makes me feel a little more like Big Boi who seems to chronicle all his 100+ plays in Words with Friends, so it’s all good.
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Nearly two years ago, I announced to the world my plan to find a word ending in -LESSNESS while playing Boggle. It hasn’t happened yet. In addition to my usual internet boggling, there was a time when I’d continually press “New Game” on wurdle, scouring only for that particular sequence, going through a hundred boards at a time, but to no avail.
Above, is a screenshot of SpellTower, an ipad game that blends boggle and tetris gameplay elements rather fantastically. The gameplay was such that finding a -LESSNESS was a very doable challenge (which doesn’t count towards my ultimate project, obviously). But don’t let my ease of finding HAPLESSNESS fool you, this is a deeply challenging game, even for the embarrassingly expert Boggle players among us.
If ever there was a subject I was an authority on, it is finding words in grids. I have devoted disgusting amounts of time to Boggle, Tangleword, Word Racer, Bogglific, Prolific, Scramble, Wurdle, Serpentine, Bookworm, W.E.L.D.E.R., and probably about ten others I have forgotten. This is all to say that you should take my recommendation of SpellTower very fucking seriously. This game is good.
SpellTower was made by some dude named Zach Gage. When I discovered his virtuosic BitPilot a few months ago, I began thinking about dropping out of school to teach myself how to make ipad games, because all word games available are relatively shitty (this is also when I conceived Scrabble-Hangman-Battleship), and I suspect I can do better. But now that Gage has gone and made a word game, I don’t think I can do better. So I still need to figure out what to do with my life.
The -LESSNESS hunt continues.
Here are some good word facts. According to sowpods:
If anyone feels like filling these into a four set venn diagram for me, that’d be super.
