Words, words, words

One game that students and mentors have been playing recently is Boggle. What I enjoy observing about Boggle is how nimble it makes people's brains. It's like watching the beginning of a dance class, while people are stretching their muscles and warming up, and then fast-forwarding to the end of class, when everyone is jumping, bending, and flexing in beautiful ways.

Boggle consists of a set of small cubes (like dice) with letters of the alphabet printed on them. To play the game, you shake up the dice and then let them settle into a small grid. With an egg timer going, players then look at the grid and try to spot as many words as they can in the jumble of letters. Each player writes a list of the words that he or she spots. You can count any letters as part of a word as long as each one is somehow touching one of the other letters. But you can't reverse direction and skip over a cube while trying to spell out your word.

The Boggle grid is small. It can be confusing to look at, because the letters may be upside down or sideways. Many players start with easy words, such as cat or tip. Sometimes that leads to a longer word, such as catch. You can sometimes get more than one word from the same group of letters, such as rear and rare.

Boggle calls upon different kinds of talents. First of all, it helps if you know a lot of words. The more possibilities you have, the more words you can find. Second, it helps if you can visualize and rearrange letters in your head. Some players combine these two skills, and impress us by their ability to find quaint and fracture.

After the game, we review our lists and compare to see who found the most unique words. This is a good opportunity to share new vocabulary, such as nit and mite. We look forward to more Boggle after the holidays.