Boggle Game Rules

Boggle Basics

• Boggle is played with a tray of 16 dice with letters printed on them rather than numbers. The dice are shaken in a special tray that lets them stand right side up so players can see 16 random letters that are used to form words. The fun comes from putting the letters together to see what words you can create. In Interactive Boggle, or one of its many imitators found online, the computer generates a series of random letters from which to form words.

  Any player can challenge the validity of any word found by another player in Boggle. The challenge must be verified by using a dictionary to see if the word is a real word and spelled correctly. If the word is not in an English language dictionary, it is not valid for use in Boggle.

Against the Clock

• Players have three minutes, counted by a timer, to form as many words as they can using the letters face up in the game tray. Each word must be at least three letters long or it doesn't count. No letter die can be used more than once in Boggle.

  In the board game version of Boggle, players have three minutes to write every word they can make out on a piece of paper used for scoring. In the online version, players type the words into the computer. When the timer hits three minutes, the scoring phase of the game begins and the players have to stop writing.

Keeping Score

• The longer the word, the more points the player earns. In standard Boggle, a three- or four- letter word is worth 1 point, a five-letter word is worth 2 points, a six-letter word is worth 3 points, a seven-letter word is worth 5 points and any word that is eight letters long or longer is worth 11 points. If more than one player uses the same word in Boggle, that word is disqualified. This means that no players can earn any points from that word.

  Each player determines his score in Boggle by adding up the points of all the words in each round. The winner of the round is the player with the highest score for the round. At the end of the game, the players total the scores from the rounds to see how they did. The winner of the game is the player with the highest total score of points from the rounds.

  One exception to the Boggle rules to watch out for is the letters Qu. Since U follows Q in most English language words, the Boggle die for Q has U printed on it. This means that Qu is counted as one letter in Boggle. For example the word Quark would be counted as four letters to score 1 point in Boggle, even though it is actually five letters long.