Games somewhat similar to Scrabble

This is only a list of references to Web pages and other resources, intended to help visitors interested in other games get to a more useful place. Unlike the Scrabble FAQ, it doesn't purport to be a resource itself.

• Anagrams
• Boggle
• UpWords
• other games

Anagrams

• John Chew describes the rules for his Tournament Anagrams game, a timed series of turns, being implemented on his crossword-game servers poslDOoM and MarlDOoM.
• John Babina has implemented a race-type Anagrams game for his server piodoom. It will be moving to his rewrite, pioplus, some day.
• According to "Word Play", in Esquire, March 1996, v.125 n.3, p46(1) traditionally the game had the following distribution of tiles:

             A 13     H  6     O 15     V  2
             B  5     I 12     P  4     W  4
             C  6     J  2     Q  2     X  2
             D  7     K  2     R 12     Y  2
             E 24     L  8     S 10     Z  2
             F  6     M  8     T 10
             G  7     N 11     U  6
    

Boggle

• Boggle is played on IRC.
• "Tray", a game a lot like Boggle, is on pioplus.
• "Jumbalaya", a game a lot like Boggle, is on the Web at NetFrolic.
• Internet Park, has a teaser for a Boggle game with $undisclosed charges$
• Even though it now produces a CD-ROM version of the game (playable over the Internet), Hasbro's official Boggle site contains no information on the game, leading merely to their generic site.

UpWords

I don't know of any organized UpWords activity in English, although its manufacturer held a very short tournament (one game each of UpWords, Boggle and Scrabble) to introduce it in 1983. Also, a nationwide UpWords competition (on the 10 x 10 boards standard there) was planned in Hungary for October 1998. On the Net, there are this brief description, a photo and a source for Braille and low vision versions. There are two official versions on CD-ROM: the e-mail version is free; and a regular version.

other games

• Ozzie, an anagramming word game. See the inventor's official page.
• Jotto, "Mastermind" with words. See an illustration.
• WordCross, for Windows, also with its own page.
• Questique, a crossword game.
• Wildwords, in which blanks can be used for any *consecutive sequence* of letters (not constrained to representing the same in multiple words).
(*PL*ITY is an example given); "like 'Scrabble' gone wild".

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Steven Alexander (stevena@teleport.com)
(probably the only owner of a stuffed ai toy)