In the popular game of Boggle, each of 16 dice has six different letters (QU substitutes for a single letter on one cube face) on it. The dice are shaken and fall into a 4x4 square, so that one letter on each cube shows. Players have three minutes to form as many words of length three or longer by moving from letter to adjacent letter either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. In this game, players may return to a letter in forming a word but may not pause on a letter. Given the sample board:

 F B U P
 T M E O
 R S H I
 E T B W

possible words are POEM, PESTER, HOPE, THEME, and RESETS, but not MESS.

In a recent game of Boggle, Chad and his dad formed the words given in the clues below, as well as many others. The following observations were made:

1. Both Chad and his dad got the words AGE and PINT, each of which showed up on the board in a straight line.
2. Chad scored big points by making FRAGMENT and PALACE, neither of which his father had on this final word list.
3. Dad scored points with CHORAL, which Chad didn't see. Both players anagrammed FAINT and ARCHLY from the board.
4. Both formed COMET, starting with a horizontal move from C to O.
5. The letter W was in the upper lefthand corner of the 4x4 square.

Reconstruct the arrangement of the top dice letters that showed on their game board.

(puzzle originally from www.allstarpuzzles.com)

This one was fun. And I love that game.

First thing you do is figure out all the letters. Adding the W makes an even 16. Then figure out what letters go next to which. A has 7 letters next to it, so it must go in one of the four middle places. C, O, R, E (interesting that it comes out to core) all have 4 letters and are best candidates for the other 4 middle spots. The letters in PINT don't need much, so probably on the side. Lining that up with AGE as A needs its letters, you start putting things where they go, and then BAMMO! The only thing I can't spell is archly. My C and O are horizontal, right to left, but can't do it. Then I realize AGE and PINT are linear, not necessarily right to left or top to bottom. Flipping those and putting things right again made it all better.

Here it is ...

WMET
OCGN
HRAI
YLFP

Posted by Lawrence on 2003-08-24 15:30:37