I went looking for letter, digram and trigram frequency counts to gauge scoring a word game I’m writing. What I found was disagreement, chaos, and unacceptably small sample sizes.

Whee.

So, I played some word games recently – Boggle and Scrabble among them – whose scoring mechanic hinges largely on board placement and on the rarity of the letters in use (the canonical “Q and Z are ten, J and X are eight” rule.) I decided that I didn’t like the distribution in use, and that it was time to generate a new one.

First step was to decide on a distribution. Scrabble’s a bunch of fun, but in all honesty it touches on a very small part of our vocabularies. Even when you’re playing against very skilled players, certain words just come out more often than others. As I’m sure to eventually start ranting about in another blog entry, I’m into the idea of educational gaming; Scrabble may have originally been invented to fill the inventor’s lack of a job time during the Great Depression, but a huge percentage of its sales these days are in a pseudoeducational capacity by parents hoping to develop their children’s lexical repertoire in a way that’s at least entertaining.

Alfred Mosher Butts, the game’s inventor, did a great job given the tools available at the time. He went as far as to histogram several major newspapers of the time for letter frequency, something which must have been blindingly boring and error prone. Possibly because his scoring and rules were subject to a decade of tinkering before the game finally took off, the rules he ended up writing are in fact quite nicely polished; the game distinguishes itself with a large number of attempted variants and an extremely small number of even moderately successful variants, which gets into another topic I’m sure to blog about sooner or later – namely how to determine when your ruleset is stable via a shaky metaphor regarding minima, maxima, local minima and fitness evaluation.

Anyhoo, Butts did a good job with the tools available to him, but it’s been almost 80 years, and I have better tools than he did. One of the best of those tools is the ability to look back on 80 years of reaction to his game, whereas he had no reflection on anything closer than a crossword puzzle. Given that there’s no competition nor any tendency to intentionally blunt the board to prevent opponent access to powerful squares, the two games aren’t similar enough that one might learn significantly from the other.

What have we learned from Scrabble, Boggle, Upwords and the ilk? What needs to change? What needs to stay? Given that this is now being considered for a videogame, what things can I do that they didn’t have the ability to do? Asploding tiles? Alternate physics? Gold, shiny shiny gold?

One particular game I’ve played a lot recently, and rather enjoyed but thought more could be done with, was Bookworm. Bookworm is basically Boggle, but with mechanics added to prevent stagnation – for example, when you use letters, they’re destroyed, allowing new letters to fall in from the top. Also, because four surfaces are too few and because people get into arguments about diagonals, Bookworm uses a hexagonal board (rendered with squares, but that’s relatively unimportant.) Still, it’s not aimed at my demographic; turns are infinite time, which is great for part of the casual gamer crowd, but combined with how long it takes for the obstacles to start showing up and how suddenly and annoyingly diffcult they become, I’m convinced that this is a very good game mechanic suffering a near-disasterously flawed implementation.

Not that I have a competitor just yet. But still. More to come. I’ve got something I think will be pretty neat underway; I’ve been playing Sid Sackson’s BuyWord, and mulling over Scorched Earth style markets. There’s something maybe new on the horizon.