Boggled by Pool Party

[dreamshark]

The Minstf Pool Party was well-attended and well hosted, sporting a surprisingly large and varied spread of party food. I had lots of good conversations, a look at one new baby and the usual assortment of children who have grown beyond all recognition since the last time I saw them. But the lasting effect came from a Boggle game that I fell into towards the end because it was easier than finding my boots so that I could leave. Although it's been months since I last played online Boggle, I retained enough skillz to almost stay even with the formidable minnehaha K, earning much admiration from the other players at the table.

This was so encouraging that I came home and downloaded the EA iPad Boggle game, which I have been playing for most of the day. I haven't tried any of the social play options (about which there are many complaints in the iTunes review) but the single player option is just about perfect as a practice platform for real-life Boggle. You can see what words you missed and replay the game again, which is a terrific way to improve. It has a really cute animation for shaking up a new boggle board (which you do, of course, by shaking the iPad) and even an option for displaying the letters in random orientation so it looks like the board you play on with a physical boggle set.

Okay, K, now I'm ready to take you on again!

Comments

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

I suggest that you should engage in a Boggle match at Minicon with minnehaha K and buttonlass to test the efficacy of your training...

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I hadn't played for months either, you know. 8-)

Peer is the best Boggle player in town, and a game with him and buttonlass would be formidable indeed. I'd be interested in playing with the 4 of us.

K.

[buttonlass.livejournal.com]

I'm willing and pleased to participate the next time I'm up.:)

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

"I hadn't played for months either, you know. 8-)"

Yeah, but you think faster than I do. Most of my online play was on larger boards with 4-6 minutes to find the words. I'm barely getting warmed up at 3 minutes.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I am curious about what characteristics (in the widest sense) make for a good Boggle player, beyond a good vocabulary. I have a good vocabulary, but am mediocre (in my opinion) at Boggle. Looking at it one way, it seems I should be good at it, because I think in patterns and I am quite good at reading upside down or sideways. (I'm one of those people you don't want on the other side of your desk when you have laid down a confidential memo.) But I'm not particularly good at Boggle.

I wonder, too, what the intersection of Boggle and Scrabble is, if there is one other than, again, good vocabulary. (I am not thinking here of people who memorize all the word list--2 letter, etc.--but of more casual players who rely mainly on their own word knowledge.) In a way, the two games seem opposite--in one, the letters are all in the "right" order and one must find the pattern; in the other, the letters (on the rack) are random, and one must put them in a sensible adjacent order (with the letters on the board, which for this purpose are each part of the random batch).

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

The two basic requirements for being good at Boggle and Scrabble are the same - vocabulary and spelling. People who enjoy both games are usually people who love both words and pattern recognition.

Scrabble is more straightforward and top-down. You have a small set of letters to work with and all the time you need to structure them and try them out in different locations on the board. Boggle is more right-brain, in that you must pick lots of patterns at once out of a jumble of letters. On the other hand, it's all about words, which is basically a left-brain activity. Boggle is harder for me than Scrabble, since I am heavily left-brained, but still fun because it's about words.

I used to be terrible at Boggle, but have gotten much faster with practice. People with more right-brain strength probably pick it up faster than I did. I take a very structured approach, looking for familiar clusters of letters to build on, and then work backwards from there. For instance, I always look for "er" or "ing" and dipthongs right at the beginning because you can build longer words with those.

It also takes practice to get used to letters that are upside down and sideways. That's why I was pleased to see that the iPad game offered the option of displaying the letters that way. When I first discovered online boggle I was disappointed to find that my improved skills didn't translate to real-life Boggle at all. I'd gotten so used to seeing all the letters right side up on the computer that I was just flummoxed by the real-life game with the letters pointing every which way.

I had also learned a bunch of oddball words that nobody else recognized, and I got tired of being challenged all the time. Because of that, I prefer to play with a dictionary on hand.