Boggle
Sixteen letter cubes are shaken into a grid, and for three minutes everyone hunts for as many words in them as they can.
The Big Boggle grid
Under these rules: Twenty-five cells, five by five.
Twenty-five cells in five rows instead of sixteen in four.
The same tray with a dome, only wider. An extra row each way changes the game more than it seems: a central cell still has eight neighbours, but the paths across the field are far more numerous, and long words stop being a rare piece of luck.
Big Boggle letter cubes
Under these rules: Twenty-five cubes.
Twenty-five cubes — nine more than the ordinary set.
Built the same way: a letter on every face, `Qu` on one of them, the underlines on `M`, `W` and `Z`. Only the count differs, and with it the size of the field they fill.
Three-minute timer
Under these rules: The same three-minute timer.
A sand timer of three minutes — the length of one round.
The timer is turned at the moment the dome comes off the grid, and the round ends with the sand. Three minutes exactly is what separates Boggle from studying a grid at leisure: you have to find faster than you can check.
Rules of Big Boggle
What differs here
Played by the rules of Boggle. Below is only where Big Boggle departs from them.
The field
Twenty-five letter cubes and a grid of twenty-five cells, five by five. Preparation is the same: cubes into the dome, grid over it, turn, shake, lift the dome and start the three minutes.
Word length
Words count from four letters, not from three.
Which words count
Any type of word — noun, verb, adjective, adverb; plural nouns are acceptable, as are all verb tenses, and words within words as well.
Proper nouns, abbreviations, contractions, hyphenated words and foreign words not in the dictionary do not count.
Scoring
| Letters | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 or more |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Points | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 11 |
Optional games
Advanced play. Each player looks only for words of five letters or more.
Handicap play. Older or more experienced players look for words of four letters or more; younger or less experienced ones may look for words of only three, each scoring one point.
Team play. Every member of a team writes their own list. A word found by more than one player on a team is crossed off only if nobody on the other team found it. The team with more points wins.
Teams are best made of players of roughly equal ability; where the ability differs, put the younger against the older.
The challenge cube
Works as it does in Boggle, and with the same table: a word through the challenge cube earns five points on top of the usual score.
Sources
- Big Boggle — Parker Brothers Bigger Challenge 3-Minute Word Game · Hasbro, Inc. Open source
Glossary of terms
- Adjoining
- Two cells adjoin if they touch on a side or a corner. The letters of a word must run through adjoining cells in sequence.
- Crossing off
- A word found by more than one player is struck from every list that holds it and scores for nobody.
- The challenge cube
- An extra cube put in place of an ordinary one; a word running through it earns five points on top of the usual score.