Boggle

Data structuresHTML UI

Boggle is a word finding game. In the real world it is played with dice with letters on their faces set in a 4x4 grid. The goal is to find as many words as possible in three minutes with more points awarded for longer words.

The dice used have a specific combination of letters so to make an authentic Boggle game you need to use those combinations, not just pick letters at random. See the References section below for a link to a description of the dice.

A basic Boggle game will provide a way to randomize the dice and then give the user three minutes to find as many words as they can. An obvious UI would be to allow the player to click on the dice to build up a word an then check that the word they built is in a list of legal words and keep score based on the lengths of the words found. The game should also enforce the rules of Boggle that require that each die picked be a neighbor of the previously picked die and that each die can only be used once in a word.

A challenge if you get the game working with the user clicking on the dice, which makes it fairly easy to tell whether they are following the rules of only using neighboring dice, an extra challenge is to allow the user to type words and for the program to figure out if it is possible to build that word given the currently showing faces.

Challenge, part 2 If you solve the typing challenge, it should be possible to write a function that uses the word list to figure out how many possible words can in fact be found given the current faces. Perhaps display that in the UI to taunt the user with how much better they could be doing.