Three-dimensional word games may be on their way

I've spent some time trying to think of a way to make a three-dimensional word grid for Scrabble or Bananagrams purposes. (The added challenge that an extra dimension would pose in such a game is very tempting!)

Cubical blocks with the same letter on all sides would almost work. Except that it wouldn't allow words to be build sideways from an upper level without other blocks acting as supports.

There are in fact, a lot of other games from the past that have been referred to as "three-dimensional Scrabble" or something similar, but they never seem to be successful, truly three-dimensional implementations.

Upwords is sometimes included in the category of 3-D word games, but it's physically more like layered Scrabble with corresponding differences in strategy. I mean, yes, technically it's three-dimensional, in that you need three-coordinates to locate a piece (row, column, height), but at any one time, it's only the topmost letter that matters. It's not really what people want when they think of 3-D Scrabble.

This patent from 1997 is for methods of making a three-dimensional Scrabble game.

A figure from the patent documents illustrates what I would consider closer to a true 3-D word game:


This patent laid out a bunch of ways that three-dimensional constructions might be done (connecting letter spheres together with magnets, velcro, and various mechanical tricks). As far as I can tell, none of these ideas ever made it to production.

Another patent was quite recently applied for for a three-dimensional word game. The inventor is listed as Joseph Elie Tefaye with Games R Us of Australia.

This figure shows the essence of the idea:


The design is reminiscent of the two-dimensional Typ-Dom, a predecessor of Scrabble invented in Austria in 1936. In Typ-Dom, the letter tiles are shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces, so that they all link together. It's an interesting way of keeping letters in place without a board. This actually strikes me as superior to having a board in some ways: You can extend the grid as far as you want in any direction, and if your table gets jostled, the tiles won't be thrown out of position. In fact, you wouldn't even need a particularly flat surface to play on.

The extension to making Typ-Dom into a three-dimensional word game just required two main ideas: 1) Using a base to build the three-dimensional word grid from, and 2) modifying the pieces so that one can link up with another at a 90 degree angle. It looks like this might work out nicely.

But if you can't stand waiting for someone else to manufacture the perfect 3-D word game, you could always make your own, Star-Trek-style:

Online Speed Scrabble: a review

I discovered that there is a web site called Supernifty which has an online Speed Scrabble game that can be played for free. Naturally, I decided to try it.

To play, you have to go through a straightforward registration process which requires only an e-mail address, a password, and a nickname. Once you've logged in you are greeted by a listing of available games that you can join, or you can create your own game. The feature that I particularly like here is that you can give a name to your game by typing it into the blank before creating the game. In principle, this gives players the ability to set up games for different skill levels or with different rules. Or if someone wants to practice on their own, they could call their game "Solitaire Only."

The game is an implementation of the "Take Two" variant of Speed Scrabble: You start with seven tiles, and once someone has formed a valid grid, two more tiles appear on the top row of every player's board, and play advances to the next "round". There is some scoring system where you get credit every time you win a round. Whoever wins the tenth and final round wins the game (and gets a lot more points). Points are also based on how long your longest word is in each round, and on how competitive your opponent is.


Diligent readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of Speed Scrabble, but this online version does away with a few of the nuisances of the offline game: Starting with a small number of letters and no ability to dump tiles makes it hard or sometimes impossible to form a valid grid early in the game. If you encounter such a situation in Supernifty Speed Scrabble, you can just skip that round by pushing the "Give up on round" button to get two more letters. (At least you can do this when playing alone, I did not run into this situation when playing with other players.)

I was a little surprised at how often the initial set of letters could be formed into a grid of words, and I started to suspect that this was by design when I got letters that seemed to coax me into forming a symmetric grid for a couple of rounds (as shown). Whether or not this is built into the program is something that I can't tell yet...

The game is implemented in Javascript, rather than Flash, which may be the reason that the interface is more minimalist. I liked how smooth and clean it felt, and since many of the games I played were solitaire games, it was overall kind of a relaxing experience (except the few times that the timer started to run down and I had to franticly drag tiles around the board.) My only frustration with the interface was that it's not possible to select a rectangle of tiles (as in the electronic version of Bananagrams) and move it around. This sometimes leads to having to shift a bunch of words from one place to another, one tile at a time. Aside from that issue, it is otherwise an intuitive interface, so you can just start playing straight away. If you'd like a more detailed description, try the official description of Speed Scrabble.

There were only a few people drifting on and off the site while I was playing, and often I was the only player on the site at all. If I am interpreting the scoring system correctly, the list of high scores corroborates the idea that there are just a handful of hard-core players and some others who have played on many occasions. But the site just came online in August of 2009 and an iPhone client for the game has been recently released, so the number of players may be on the rise.

If you like online word games and you want to try something different, I can recommend Supernifty's version of Speed Scrabble.

Bananagrams lecture on March 11, 2010

Abe Nathanson, the creator of Bananagrams, is going to give a lecture, titled "The Success of Bananagrams", Thursday, March 11th, at 5:30pm at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. The lecture will take place in Moore Hall II.

The map on the event page actually has the wrong location. I've plotted the actual location on this Google Maps map with the lecture hall dead center:

I'd really like to hear this lecture as I'm sure it will be interesting. If anyone gets the chance to attend this talk, please send me a report.

Zip-It and Oh-Spell!: Two new games from the makers of Bananagrams

The makers of Bananagrams unveiled their latest creations at the American International Toy Fair this month.

Zip-It is a two player game in which each player gets 12 letter cubes (dice with letters on all sides) and then has to assemble them into a grid of words as quickly as possible. The first to finish their grid says "Zip!" and scores one point. You can keep track of the score by incrementing the two zippers built into the bag for the game pieces.

Coincidentally, I have been recently thinking that it would be neat to make a game with letter cubes, like in Boggle, except that the player would get to choose which side to use. The cube aspect of Zip-It is tantalizing. Imagine playing Bananagrams with letter cubes. I imagine that there might be a lot of head-tilting to look at cubes from the sides. If you don't like one of the face-up letters, you could just rotate it until you found a letter that you liked. But is that the fastest method? I really want to play this right now and find out!

Oh-Spell! is the first card game from Bananagrams International. It sounds somewhat like Quiddler in the sense that the cards have letters rather than numbers, and the objective is to form words. There is a twist involving the cards having suits... It's not yet clear how that will play into the game. And I have a suspicion that rather than making separate words, players will form a word grid from the cards in their hand. But at this point, that's just a rumor (which I started because I think it will make a cool game).

I will report back when I have more details on these games.

Zip-It and Oh-Spell! should be available in a few months.

UPDATE: OK, these games were not released by the summer, as I had expected. Oh-Spell has been delayed indefinitely, but Zip-It is now out. Get it while it's hot!

Some Bananagrams puzzles

I found a neat kind of Bananagrams puzzle that I have never seen before. Explaining them might give away that step of discovery, so I will just link to three examples:

• puzzle #1


• puzzle #2


• puzzle #3

I have a solution for the last one, and I think I know how to solve the second one, though it's not really my style, so I made my own variation:



If you want a rather significant hint to how to approach these puzzles, I suggest looking at this post and this one.

Enjoy!

The Werewolf game

Wired Magazine has a nice article about Werewolf, a sort of parlor game that is apparently becoming very popular in certain circles.

A game called "Mafia" was invented in the mid-eighties and spread rapidly. It showed up in the United States and was then modified to have a more fitting werewolf theme by Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a., Zarf) who then popularized it on the Internet. Andrew Plotkin is a major figure in the indie Interactive Fiction community which produces text adventures that are the evolutionary descendants of the old Infocom games.

Just as you might refer to Bananagrams as like Scrabble without a board (or pauses or lots of other things...), Werewolf has been described as like poker without cards. In a typical game, two players are secretly designated as Werewolves and the rest are Villagers. The game is divided into a series of day and night turns. During the nighttime turns, everyone closes their eyes except the Werewolves, who silently pick a Villager to "kill". They indicate this to a moderator who removes that person from the game. During the daytime turns, the Villagers have the opportunity to pick someone that they think is a Werewolf and lynch them. Since the identities of the Werewolves are secret, the Werewolves can participate in the debate over who should be killed, trying to maintain their cover and divert suspicion to someone else. The object of the game for the Villagers is to identify and eliminate all the Werewolves. To win, the Werewolves only have to survive until there are the same number of Villagers left as Werewolves.

It is a game of persuasion and bluffing and inference. It's very interesting to see how different people play the game and what tactics are successful in convincing a crowd to choose a certain way.

Detailed instructions can be found on Zarf's page on Werewolf. Or you might like the extra details compiled by Wired, including how to host your own Werewolf game, a cheat sheet, and the many different extra roles that can be added.

All that you need to play Werewolf is a group of people, but if you'd like some fancy cards to designate who the Werewolves are and who plays the other roles, you can find a PDF of free Werewolf cards that you can print out here (courtesy of http://www.ee0r.com/proj/werecard.html). Or if you want to buy a more formal version, the Looney Labs "Are You A Werewolf?" set is pretty cheap. One could, of course, use any other scheme for designating the Werewolves. For instance: each player chooses a Bananagrams tile from a pool that is pre-arranged to have 2 or 3 W tiles for the Werewolves and enough E tiles for everyone else.

If you are looking for a game that is out of the ordinary, I can definitely recommend Werewolf.

Some more of the Official Scrabble Dictionary's greatest mistakes

After posting my essay describing the many problems with the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD), I discovered that I am not the only one who has issues with the official Scrabble word lists. An article from the Times of London reports that the official Scrabble word list has come under increased criticism, arguing that the popularity of online Scrabble games has brought players of different positions on this issue into conflict.

The article points out that there is a Facebook group called "The Official Scrabble Dictionary: Winner or Whack?" which appears to be a venue for people to debate the merits of the OSPD. The group has 20 members at present, so the remarkable thing is not that there are some people who have complaints, but that those complaints are being heard. In the UK, the analog of the OSPD is called "Official Scrabble Words" (OSW). The first version of this British Scrabble word list was compiled by Allan Simmons (Scrabble columnist for the Times) and Darryl Francis in 1988. They still maintain the list. Simmons was interviewed in the article:

Mr Simmons is in favour of a wide variety of words, but he believes that archaic words should be removed from the list. "There are lots of archaic, obsolescent words that came from Chambers dictionary. That's not good for trying to promote Scrabble in schools. One of the words that annoys me is 'smoyle', an old form of 'smile'. Nobody is going to spell 'smile' that way now."

In a separate opinion piece, Simmons gives an overview of the situation, concluding that:

We, in the driving seat of the Scrabble community, should be letting go of the archaic word baggage in the interest of a more publicly acceptable word list. We should have a cleanout of all the spellings of ye olde literary works that are no longer in use.

So it sounds like word list reform may be coming to Britain. Whether this will mean changes to the word lists used in America remains to be seen. If dictionary reform is not imminent, we could always organize a demonstration. After all, who could pass up the opportunity to be part of a Million Banana March?