Babble

July 31, 2005 11:59 PM

Babble - a seriously addictive hybrid of Boggle and Scrabble.
posted by Melinika (14 comments total)

You have 24 hours to search the board for as many words as you can (like Boggle) and for the highest-scoring words you can find (like Scrabble).

You can watch the chatlog below the board for hints or ignore it completely if you want.

There's a new board every day.
posted by Melinika at 12:06 AM on August 1, 2005

I hope I will not get addicted to this like I did to sodoko!
posted by Christrust at 2:01 AM on August 1, 2005

I curse the day I discovered Suduko.
posted by johnny novak at 3:15 AM on August 1, 2005

Webboggle is much more fun and clever...
posted by jpburns at 3:41 AM on August 1, 2005

I second the opinion on Weboggle, even if I hardly ever crack the top ten in a game.
posted by JHarris at 3:55 AM on August 1, 2005

This looks fun enough, but I don't think the comparison to Scrabble is warranted - or at least not any more than any game involving letters is like Scrabble. This is just Boggle with letters. It has none of the strategic positioning, defense, planning of future moves, nor many other elements that make up Scrabble. Babble seems more like a hybrid of Boggle and a word search puzzle.

Having picked that nit, I'm going back to play.
posted by scottreynen at 4:50 AM on August 1, 2005

Babble lacks the racing-the-clock element that makes Weboggle both so fun and challenging and so damn stressful. It looks like the strategy would be the same as Weboggle (find as many word as you can) - with the only difference being that some of the letter are now worth more.
posted by Slack-a-gogo at 5:39 AM on August 1, 2005

Here's how you could tweak the gameplay a little bit:
1. Once someone puts a word on his list, no-one else can have it.
2. You only get to put, oh, say, eight words on your list. Once you've put a word on your list, you can't remove it.

Now there's some strategy involved and the point values for the letters become a little more meaningful.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:55 AM on August 1, 2005

note that in today's puzzle, you can play the word META.

I've played SuDoKu. This is no SuDoKu.
posted by sdrawkcab at 7:20 AM on August 1, 2005

I like WEBoggle a lot and it's great if you want to play a fast, pressure-cooker game. But I've played Babble every day for the past week precisely because I don't have to sit and focus all my attention on it. I can play for five minutes or an hour at a time. I can go away and do something else and come back to it. It stays fresh because every time I come back to it I spot a new word, or there's another hint from the chatlog to work on.

There are plenty of quick, timed games online, but it's not so often I've found a simple game with a slower, steadier pace that's still multiplayer/social. It's fun for me that the competition is friendly, not cutthroat. Since each puzzle lasts all day, it's not a requirement to think fast, but to think thoroughly (did I get every plural? did I try a variant spelling? did I check if this word has prefixes or suffixes?).

The element of letter-points is more important than you might think, since how many points you have is what ranks you against everyone else in the end - how many words you have doesn't. I have a friend who doesn't always get as many words as I have, yet she's beaten me because she's gotten more of the high-point words (she's got a knack for offbeat/obscure longer words from playing Scrabble). Plus, in giving hints, or in trying to figure out which words you don't have yet, the words' point-totals is a great clue.
posted by Melinika at 9:06 AM on August 1, 2005 [1 favorite]

I'm having fun
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 11:59 AM on August 1, 2005

Oh, man, I'm going to waste so much time playing this.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:11 PM on August 1, 2005

Don't online anagram generators make this a bit redundant?
posted by Sparx at 4:13 PM on August 1, 2005

Oh, heck. I hoped this would be a web based version of the classic old DOS program called Babble!, which would scramble text from multiple sources into new and incomprehensible sentences, with lots of bells and whistles:

http://www.bradsucks.net/archives/2004/08/20/text-generators/

If somebody made a modern version of Babble! with a grammer checker, and something to order sentences into paragraphs, it could replace most of the Internet, that is, the one billion monkeys typing on one billion keyboards.
posted by kablam at 7:11 PM on August 1, 2005