How to Play Boggle (TM) Word Search Game

Boggle (TM) is a word search game where players score points for finding unique words in the board. According to the game rules, a word is considered unique if no other player has the word on his or her list. The Boggle game board has 16 dice with letters on each of the 6 faces. You shake the dice so that they randomly fall into slots on a 4x4 grid. Once the timer has been set, each player writes down all of the words he or she can find in the grid.

After the time is up, all of the players compare their word lists. If any two (or three or four) players have the same word on their lists, each player must cross it out. Of the remaining words, points are awarded as follows:

No points are awarded for words that contain fewer than three letters, though when playing with young children, some family games permit two-letter words.

Finding Words in Boggle

In Boggle, you can trace a path up, down, left, right, or diagonally to form a word. The only restriction is that you cannot use a die more than once to form a single word. Here are some examples:

Boggle Dice Structure

In the older version of 4x4 boggle, the 16 dice were inscribed with the letters according to the following scheme:


Currently, in newer 4x4 games, the letters are distributed according to this arrangement:
The letter 'Q' is actually 'Qu' on the dice. Notice that there are an abundance of E's and A's in the letter distributions; this is because E and A are the most commonly used letters in English. In 4x4 Boggle, the longest possible words are enterohepatitis and inequitableness, as well as grandiloquences and iterativenesses, though these latter two are more questionable English constructions. In the older 4x4 version of Boggle, the longest word is infrangibleness.

Boggle Deluxe is played with a 5x5 grid whose 25 dice and letters are distributed according to this layout:


In Boggle Deluxe, the scoring system is the same, but words must contain at least four letters. The longest words in Boggle Deluxe are antiadministration and noncooperationists.

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