A blog for fans of Bananagrams, word games, puzzles, and amazing things
Showing posts with label grids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grids. Show all posts

Thursday, February 17, 2011

A word grid puzzle

What special property does this word grid have?

               ODD
                 ICEBOX
            ECHOED          
          D K  H           
         XEBEC    
       H  E
     BOOKED

The answer, encrypted with ROT-13: "Gur tevq pna or zveebe-ersyrpgrq iregvpnyyl gb trarengr n qvssrerag tevq jvgu inyvq jbeqf." Good luck!

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Stupid Bananagrams tricks: Word grid with mirror symmetry

I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to make a perfectly symmetric Bananagrams word grid using all 144 Bananagrams tiles. I decided to use mirror symmetry, so a word spelled out horizontally on the left hand side would have to be reversed on the right hand side and yet still spell a real word. Can it be done? Let's find out.

First, I consulted my letter distribution for Bananagrams to see which letters occurred an odd number of times in a Banangrams set. For instance, there are three W tiles, so I knew that at least one (and possibly all three) would have to occur on the center line of the grid to maintain mirror symmetry.

I then tried to build those letters into vertical words. Next I built some horizontal palindromes off of those center-line words. I got some good palindromic words from Wiktionary.

Finally, I worked on linking everything up. This step took the longest time. Fortunately, I found a list of words, that when reversed, yield different English words (like "tuba" and "abut"). These are called "semordnilaps". I particularly liked the ERGO/OGRE pair, so I managed to work that one into my grid. After a lot of fiddling around, I wound up with the grid shown below.
       C
H
GAG
R
M
OH E HO
I MADAM I
N A A N
KNOW WONK
E B E
U EYE U
R R R R
OGRE ERGO
BUN NUB
O O
X J P J X
RECAPS A SPACER
S I L V L I S
L A E A L
T T
Q DEIFIED Q
U A L A U
I Z O Z I
TIDE EWE EDIT
V O O V
Y TIN NIT Y
F T F
STATS
D
Voila! The world's first palindromic Bananagrams grid!