WordSquared update

The WordSquared team has been busy. After reprogramming their massively mutliplayer Scrabble game (previously reviewed here) to be faster and more responsive, they've rolled out a blog and more site improvements:

• There is now a real login system, giving you the option to either assign a password to your existing WordSquared username or link your Word² game to one of a number of other accounts (Google, Twitter, Facebook, AIM, Yahoo, or OpenID). Which means no more worrying about losing your game due to site upgrades. And your game is no longer tied to a particular browser via cookies, so you can log in anywhere and play.
• The game now tracks and displays statistics about your games, like the longest word that you have formed (longest since statistics started, that is).
• Whenever you lay down a word, the resulting score (or scores, when you form multiple words) appear on the screen at the location of the word and float gently upward before disappearing. It's a nice, elegant effect. (This turns out to be the way HTML5 browsers display word scores. Current Firefox versions (>3.6.9 but <4.0) do not have any HTML5 capability built in, not even as an option, so I prefer Safari for Word².)
• WordSquared now has achievements that you can earn. Some are based on the number of words that you have formed, but I knew right away which one I wanted to get:
  
  I also picked up this one:
  
  Getting a rack of Is was pretty easy, but to get to the T Party, I had to unload one last J. It can be tricky to find a place to dump a J. I wound up scrolling way back along the path of words that I have made, trying to find an AM or OUST or OWL or an UMP or a UKE. (This is where it would be nice to have a search function to let me jump to particular words I've already formed). Eventually I found an unobstructed INN and went with JINN. Which seems like an appropriate way to get to the T Party, as I can totally imagine Mr. T playing a genie.
  
  Achievements are not retroactive, so you get to earn them all (even easy ones like "Get a rack with no vowels") for the first time.
  
  The achievements stay on your screen until you dismiss them, so you can continue playing with the cartoon Mr. T overlapping your board as long as you like, pitying your foolish moves.
• And finally, while it's not a new feature, I just discovered that since WordSquared is an HTML5 game, it is possible to zoom in and out just by changing the font size. This is really cool and often preferable to scrolling the board since it can be done quickly with a keystroke.

Also, Word² now produces sound effects when you lay down tiles and score points. You can toggle them on or off with the speaker icon in the lower right.

The Word² coders have formed a company called Massively Fun, and their site says that Word² is to be just the first of their games. Good luck guys!

---

Further reading:

• Totally Unofficial WordSquared FAQ
• Sightseeing in the WordSquared world

Ghost, Superghost, and Disorder: Word-dodging games

I recently played a game called Disorder, which is a neat little word-building (or more accurately, word-avoiding) game. To explain it, it's best to start with the simpler games that it is based on:

We begin with an old parlor game called Ghost. In Ghost, players take turns adding letters to a word they are building, trying to avoid being the one to actually finish a complete word. If a player adds a letter that makes it impossible to form a real word (e.g., T-R-I-C-J), another player can challenge him. If the first player cannot name a legitimate word that he's trying to make, he loses the game. But if the challenger is wrong, he loses instead.

Example gameplay:

Player 1: A
Player 2: M [A and AM are words, but words shorter than 4 letters are permitted.]
Player 1: B
[At this point in the game, there are lots of words that players may be thinking of like AMBITIOUS, AMBULANCE, AMBUSH, AMBIGUOUS, AMBLE. But with each new letter the options narrow.]
Player 2: E
[This is a brilliant play because the only common words that can be formed starting with AMBE all have the root AMBER which is a valid word. The options for Player 1 are to choose the R and lose or choose another letter and try to bluff. Bluffing adds an interesting gameplay dimension to Ghost and related games.]

A Ghost variant called Superghost allows players to add letters to both the beginning and the end of the proto-word, opening wide the strategic possibilities and making for a game that you really have to think about.

The writer James Thurber enjoyed playing Superghost with his friends and wrote a New Yorker essay about it back in 1951 (delightfully titled, 'Do You Want to Make Something Out of It? (Or, if you put an "o" on "understo," you'll ruin my "thunderstorm")'). The essay can be found on the New Yorker site (behind a paywall) or in a collection of Thurber's writings called Thurber Country).

Finally we come to Disorder, which is a board game that comes with 1) cards that players get dealt so that they have a hand of letters to choose from, 2) a long skinny board with slots for each card to go into as the word is being built, and 3) chips for keeping score. In addition to giving players a set of letters that they can use for word-extending, Disorder introduces a few more twists on Superghost. Mixed into the deck of letters are four types of power cards. The Exchange card lets you swap a card in your hand with a card on the board. The Switch card lets you take two cards on the board and switch their positions. The Squeeze card allows you to make a one-card gap anywhere in the word and insert a card from your hand. And the Pass card lets you skip a turn.

And finally, any card can be used as a wild card, simply by flipping it over (they all say "wild!" on the back) and laying it down as part of the word. Wild cards can be tricky to deal with since (unlike in Scrabble, where a player declares what the blank tile represents) in Disorder, the wild card can be any letter. This makes it easier to build toward a word without giving away to your opponents what you are planning, but it also makes it difficult to think of all the possible words that could be in play.

Scoring is simple. Each card has a point value on it, with harder letters like Q and Z having correspondingly larger point values (roughly like in Scrabble). At the end of the round, the point values of the cards that have been played on the board are summed, and the total is awarded to whoever lost the round. After how ever many rounds are played, the winner is the player who accumulates the least points. I enjoy playing Disorder so much that I am willing to play without keeping score (though that may just be the Bananagrammer in me).

Disorder is a great game. I have already bought someone a copy for Christmas.

I like having the cards and the board, but in a pinch, this could be played with Bananagrams tiles with a few modifications: Each player can take 7 Bananagrams tiles and, in the absence of racks, just stand the tiles up on their edges. Note that Disorder has a flat letter distribution (4 cards for each letter of the alphabet). While I haven't tried it, I think that using the standard Bananagrams distribution of letters will still be fine. The important adjustment I would recommend borrowing from Disorder is the notion that you can play a tile face-down and have it act as a wildcard. If you're playing for the first time, I suggest starting off with the regular Ghost version until you are ready to graduate to the Superghost variety.


Ghost lends itself to rule variation, spawning games with names like "Superduperghost" and "Spook". My ambition is to come up with a mutation that will best them all. I think I'll call it "Pac-Man".

Sightseeing in the WordSquared world

I have posted several previous articles about WordSquared, which is essentially simultaneous multiplayer Scrabble on an infinite grid. The interesting thing about WordSquared is that it can be played in so many different ways. Some players focus on maximizing their score with rack-clearing words that hit lots of bonus squares. Others take a more defensive approach, working to build away from anyone who might try to encircle or entrap them. And then there are those who, amidst everything else that is going on, find the space and time to build some wonderful things. In this post, I'm going to highlight some of my favorite WordSquared creations.

For those who want to navigate to the sights and see whether they are still there, I give the (x,y) coordinates for each location which you may use to locate features in the WordSquared world, as I previously described.

Let's start with this elegant chain of linked diamonds around (1600,-3800).
Note that it is formed almost entirely from two-letter words.


Then there is RON at (1300,2950):


What seems like someone's name has been rapidly covered in word kudzu, like some ancient relic.


What is the biggest designed structure in all of Word²? The hugest one I could find is this pair of parallel lines, stretching across hundreds of 15-by-15 boards like the Great Wall of WordSquared. They are located near y=-320; the longer one stretches from x=-5530 to x=-630 (over 300 Scrabble boards in length), though there are some gaps in there (just like in the Chinese version).


The area below caught my attention because it is unusually spindly. I initially dubbed this area Longwordia until I realized their was a fancier-pants (and more appropriate) name for it: Sesquipedalia.



Since the WordSquared "rack" consists of 7 tiles, obviously not every long word can easily be constructed. Either one must choose a long word that can be formed by starting with a medium length word and extending it as the letters become available, or one must separately form two or more carefully placed words and then link them up to form one superword.


Admittedly, art is not the only motivation for building Sesquipedalia. Making those long words (and, more specifically, making them on top of triple word score squares) must have earned the architect a lot of points.

Once you think through this process, you can better appreciate the challenge of assembling a bunch of interlocking long words like this. An even better example of a construction challenge is this 6-by-6 word square at (-45,-1480): It's not enough to just accumulate letter and start building words. If you play DIAPERS horizontally and then IGNORE underneath it, you will have made several invalid vertical words (like DI, IG, and PO). I'm close to solving the puzzle of how this square can be made, but solutions are still welcome.


This impressive spiral form at (2300,1200) must have been made from the outside in, winding down, fittingly, with the word SPIRALS.



Above and to the left of the spiral is a huge triangular structure, best appreciated up close: Notice how the words snake around in a pattern that is always one tile wide, while leaving empty space that is also everywhere only one tile wide. A pattern of this scope and complexity makes me wonder whether it is the work of one of the few "bots" that have been programmed to play Word². Or, possibly, aliens are responsible...

These are just some of the wonders you can find while playing WordSquared. And as the WordSquared world continues to boom, the number of amazing things will grow along with it. Stay tuned!

---

Further reading:

• Totally Unofficial WordSquared FAQ

The new crop of games from the makers of Bananagrams: Zip-It, et al.

First they brought us Bananagrams. Last year they introduced Appletters and Pairs in Pears. This fall, they released so many new items that I feel like I am going to have to make a list:

1. Zip-It is like an accelerated version of Bananagrams, except instead of tiles, you get twelve letter cubes. And unlike in Boggle, you can turn each of those cubes and use whichever side you want. A typical time for forming those cubes into a grid of words is reported to be about twenty seconds! It sounds super-frenetic, like playing Bananagrams on a roller coaster. Zip-It comes with Weords, a small book containing game-winning weird words.
2. The 4th Bananagrams book has been released: 10-Minute Bananagrams, in which each puzzle is designed to be solved in 10 minutes or less.
3. The Bananagrams 2011 Page-a-day Calendar - perfect for your favorite Bananagrams addict.
   
   

2014 UPDATE: More recent games from the makers of Bananagrams: Bananagrams WildTiles - a new version of Bananagrams with extra monkey-themed wildcard tiles.

Also available are the French version of Bananagrams, for the family Francophile or polyglot, and the German version of Bananagrams.

UPDATE 2: The release of Oh-Spell is apparently not as imminent as I had wishfully thought. But in the meanwhile we have, coming very soon... Fruitominoes, the first non-word-game game from the makers of Bananagrams.

Unbananagrammable words

In my search for the longest word that you can make in a Bananagrams game, I found a few words (like "floccinaucinihilipilification") which can't be spelled with a standard 144-tile set of Bananagrams because there aren't quite enough of one letter or another. For instance, there are only two Ks in a bag of Bananagrams, and there are at least two words with three or more Ks in common use today.

I started off by studying the letter distribution for a Bananagrams set, shown here:

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z
13	3	3	6	18	3	4	3	12	2	2	5	3	8	11	3	2	9	6	9	6	3	3	2	3	2

And then I decided to compile a sampling of unbananagrammable words (leaving out some obscure or questionable ones), beginning with the letter...

B

Which word has more than three Bs? It appears in The Sound of Music. It's in a song (naturally). It's that "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" song. Answer: The word is flibbertigibbet, meaning a flighty person, and it's generally used in a critical fashion. I kind of like this word and vote that the nuns try to cut flibbertigibbets some slack.

C

There are about 100 words that would require more than three C tiles to construct, but most of them are highly technical, like "diplococcus" (a kind of bacteria) or compound words like "sacrococcyx" that have to do with things near or connecting to the tailbone. (As a corollary, you can make the word coccyx in Bananagrams (if you ever wind up with all 3 Cs).)

A concrescence is a collection of parts that have grown together, like a bunch of cells in a biological context. The verb meaning to grow together is "concresce".

My new favorite C-laden word is scacchic. It's a very obscure word meaning "pertaining to chess". And it is the shortest word in English that contains four Cs.

F

riffraff - The people who are to be kept out. Used in a dismissive fashion. Depending on who's using the word, the riffraff may contain flibbertigibbets.

K

Yes, we are already at K! The two common words with more than two Ks are kickback and knickknack (4 Ks!).

A third example is knickerbockers. Knickerbockers are short pants for men that come down below the knee, but not all the way down to the ankle. They have mostly gone out of fashion, but a variant of knickerbockers can still be seen as a part of the uniform worn by baseball players.

M

metagrammatism - This means the practice of forming anagrams. It more commonly goes by the term "anagrammatism".

mummiform - Shaped like a mummy. There are a lot of cool -iform words like "igniform", meaning shaped like fire and "cucumiform", meaning shaped like a cucumber.

P

whippersnapper - An inexperienced yet cocky kid. The term was originally coined to describe 17th-century slackers who hung out on the street, snapping whips for no reason. Somewhere along the way the meaning morphed to its current form. No thanks to the whippersnappers!

S

stresslessness has an amazing 7 Ss AND it is a word that people actually use sometimes.

possessionlessness, in contrast, seems a little unwieldy and virtually never appears in print. But it does have 8Ss, and that counts for something.

Z

pizzazz is kind of amazing for being over 57% Z (not to mention 71% pizza). "Pizzazz" is the shortest word that you cannot spell with one set of Bananagrams tiles.


That's it! There are really very few words you can't spell with Bananagrams. And maybe a spell checker.

---

Further reading:

• The longest word that you can make in Bananagrams
• Comparison of letter distributions from different word games

Boggle + Jenga = Konexi

One new game that caught my eye is called Konexi. It has the word formation aspect of Boggle and the balancing act aspect of Jenga. But instead of Jenga-style (also Operation-style, I suppose) delicate removal of parts, in Konexi you have to carefully add letters to an existing tree-like structure without causing it to collapse.

Gameplay is simple. You start by laying out the twenty-six plastic letters in a big circle. Then on each turn, you throw a die and move a special marker the indicated number of positions around the circle. The letter you land on is the one that you have to place in the tree. The object is to position the letter so that it connects to a set of letters that you can anagram to form a word. So for instance, in the illustration on the box, you can see that the words WORD and GAME could have been claimed (by the players who played the W and the E respectively), but if the D had already been there when GAME was formed, a better play would have been to claim GAMED since you get an extra point for each letter in the word. First player to twenty wins. Knocking down the tree loses a player three points and requires a new tree to be started.


And yes, it's not just a trick of perspective; the game box really is a trapezoid.

I really like the dual challenge of forming anagrammed words while maintaining a balanced structure. This may wind up being my new favorite game.

Meet Kigonagrams: Bananagrammy thing & online haiku toy

The simple, elegant design of Bananagrams tiles lends them to a wide range of activities. They are perfect for rapidly sliding around a table as you race to build words faster than your opponents in a frenzy of QATs and JETs and ZOOs. And they are also perfect for less focused, more creative play, like building little Bananagrams sculptures or composing Bananagrams poetry.

It was this last activity that inspired a design student named Fred Truman to program an online environment for rearranging letter tiles into haikus. It's called Kigonagrams, a name that Truman explains as

the combination of anagrams (or obviously bananagrams) and kigo, which are words or phrases associated with a particular season used in Japanese poetry.

Kigonagrams starts off by giving you a randomly selected haiku, like this: And then it sets you loose to play with the tiles, so you can make something like this:
The controls for resetting the tiles to their original positions and requesting a new set of tiles are way at the bottom of the page.

The grayed-out "tweet your haiku @kigonagrams" is an encouragement, but also an indication of a possible future feature.

The most fun part for me was dragging one tile into others and watching as a bunch of tiles got pushed out of position. This kind of physics modelling is a feature that would be cool to see in other online word games someday.

---

Further reading:

• My previous excursions into Bananagrams poems and word game poetry