I’ve been asked by a few friends to post my Excel “Boggle” game. A little, background: I’ve always loved word games, especially Boggle and Scrabble. When I was a kid, my mom and I used to sit and play them for hours. When we didn’t have either available to us, we’d simply pick a random word and see how many words we could make from it. Boggle and Scrabble acted as a gateway to anagrams, cryptograms, etc… I also love geeking around in Excel. Few things make me giddier than a night of pivot tables and array formulas with U2 or Elmore James pumping through my earbuds. The two passions were bound to collide sometime. That moment came last Christmas when we were up at the cabin with my folks. A noise moratorium had been imposed, so I decided to use excel to generate the tiles for me. Like most of my projects, it just kinda scope-creeped from there.
The game looks and plays just like Boggle, right down the the plastic lid. Before uploading, I changed the lid to say “Bagel”, just in case someone on Hasbro’s legal team misinterpreted my enthusiasm for their product. To start playing, just click the button that says “Shake”. When you do, the tiles will randomize and a timer will start. (I tried to avoid using VBA or Macros (programming) but there as simply no way around it for starting the game.) After that, just start typing. You’ll be alerted if your word is too short, already entered, not contained in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary or cannot be formed from the letters on the board. (A formula is used to determine if the word can be created by using only the characters on the board using each character just once. However, it can’t tell if the tiles are actually connected -that would require additional programming and I just wasn’t in the mood. Besides, I’m not planning to cheat.) When the timer is up, you’ll be notified.
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