About Loggle: Version 1.0 - August 29, 2004

Loggle is a word game based on the popular Boggle™ dice letter game, and was written by using Macromedia Director MX 2004. Loggle is currently available as a Shockwave applet and as a standalone application for the Macintosh and Windows platforms.

Loggle is designed to be controlled entirely with a mouse to simplify gameplay. The object of Loggle is to build as many unique words as possible, before you run out of time, by clicking on adjacent letters on the letter grid in the order the letters appear in an actual word. Letters may be connected horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. The longer the word you build the more points it's worth.

Legal Stuff:

Loggle is freeware and may not be distributed in any form without the express permission of the author.

The Setup Screen:

"Name" - You may give yourself a name of up to 10 characters. This name will be used to save your name and score if it beats one of the current top 10 scores.

"Minutes Per Game" - This allows you to set the number of minutes a game will last. The allowed range per game is 1-5 minutes. The default time is 2 minutes

"Double-Click Speed " - Loggle allows you to double-click a letter to play a word. For example, if you make the word "STICK" you can double-click the letter 'K' and the whole word will be checked against the word list to determine its score. Because there is so much double-click speed variation among players you have the option to adjust the tolerance of the double-click to suit your player reflexes.

Geek Note: The range of the double-click speed interval is 100-800 milliseconds, with a default setting of 300. The 300 millisecond setting evolved through trial and error with a modest test group.

Game Sounds On - This checkbox allows you to turn on or off the game (clicking) sounds.

Playing Loggle:

To play Loggle, click on a letter that is the same as the first letter of an actual word. Keep clicking adjacent letters until you have selected the whole word. As you click each letter they will be shown in the "Word Display" box at the top of the screen. Words must have at least 3 letters, and words shorter than 3 letters do not count.

Loggle game play differs from the traditional version of Boggle" in that you are allowed to replay letters that have already been selected, as long as they can be connected to the last letter you clicked. For example, if you had the following four letters together on the board:

You could make the words "STEP" and "STEPS" because you can reuse the letter "S" since it' is connected to the letter "P." This variation of the game makes it much more interesting than traditional Boggle".

Note: When you reuse a letter it will be colored green to show that it was used more than once for a particular word.

Submitting a Word:

When you have built a whole word you may submit it one of three ways:

Once you have submitted a word, Loggle will attempt to find the word in its word list. If the word is found it will be added to the "Played Words" list and you will earn a score for that word. Otherwise, the "Word Display" box at the top of the screen will be colored red, indicating that your word was not found. If this is the case, and the "Word Display" box is highlighted in red, click on the "Word Display" box at the top of the screen to clear your current choice of letters.

If Loggle determines that you have tried to submit a word that was already played, the "Word Display" box at the top of the screen will be highlighted light purple. Clicking on the "Word Display" box at the top of the screen will clear your current choice of letters so you can try another word. If you accidentally click on a wrong letter, or if you have chosen a series of letters that are not a legitimate word, you can clear your chosen letters and tiles in one of three ways:

• Click the "Clear" button.

• Click anywhere inside the "Word Display" box at the top of the screen.

• Hit the "Delete" (Macintosh) or "Backspace" (Windows) key.

Scoring:

Loggle scores words as follows:

When you finish playing a game you will have the option to view a summary of your score, as well as any bonus points you may have received. From here you may view your game screen again, view the top 10 scores, or start a new game.

Bonus Scoring:

In addition to the face value points for each word you create, Loggle adds a bonus score, based on the number of letters you used per word that you played in a game. Note: You will only receive bonus points for making 5 or more words of a given length.

If you score enough points your name will be added to the high score list, as shown below. Only the current top 10 scores will be retained. On this screen you may go back to view your score statistics, or start a new game.

Loggle Letters:

Loggle uses the same distribution of letters found in a real (4x4) traditional Boggle" game. A traditional Boggle" game uses 16 dice that draw from 96 total letters. Loggle simulates the throwing of 16 Boggle" dice and will always arrange the letters to comply with actual Boggle" dice. This means that only one die "face" for each of the 16 simulated letter dice will be displayed for any particular round. The distribution of letters among the dice are as follows:

About the word list used in Loggle:

Loggle uses a standardized word list derived from the Enable2K dictionary. The Enable2K word list is in the public domain and is considered to be the most thoroughly researched and maintained for word game usage. Loggle uses the Enable2K word list, but only includes words with 3-8 characters. Though longer words are available in the Enable2K word list it is unlikely that a word longer than 8 characters can be made on the 4x4 Loggle "board," so longer words have been excluded from the word list to reduce the size of the application. The Loggle word list has a word distribution as follows for each letter:

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