J Boyes
United States
Unspecified
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This is a game that I have seeking for a while now. I have only played it once over at a friends house, because a friend of that friend brought it over. I certainly have been keeping my eyes peeled at thrift stores and garage sales ever since.
Here is the short review: Big boggle is like regular Boggle, only with an extra row of letters, and the rule change that the words you find must be at least 4 letters long rather than three. This is a welcome change to the game that helps favor non-boggle addicts.
Here is the longer review:
If you haven’t played boggle before it is a word game. It consists of a plastic tray partitioned off to hold dice, and a pile of dice with letters on them instead of pips or numbers. You put the dice into the tray and cover it up with a plastic dome and you shake the hell out of the thing making a terrible racket. Then you shake the tray for a bit until the cubes have all fallen into one of the partitioned squares, giving you a grid of letters. In regular boggle the grid is only 4x4, in big boggle the grid has been increased to 5x5.
A competed boggle board might look something like this…
   
 
  
 
The goal of the game is to create words by connecting the letters vertically horizontally or diagonally, but without using the same letter twice. In regular boggle you may make words as small as three letters long but in big boggle your words must be at least 4 letters long.
So in the above grid you could make: Paid, Vine, Cane, Canes etc…
You cannot make a word like pupa, because it would make you use the P twice.
As per most word games, foreign words and proper nouns are out, so while spelling Venus is certainly cool, it wouldn’t get you any points.
The scoring if I remember correctly is as follows.
4 letter word: 1 point
5 letter word: 2 points
6 letter word: 3 points
7 letter word: 5 points
+2 points per letter after that.
The game is played in three rounds usuall, though you can play however many you want. During the round you write down as many words as you can. The timer I think is for about 2 minutes, though it seems longer. When the timer is done everyone playing compares their word lists, crossing off any duplicated words. So if two players both have, EVEN, written down, nobody gets any points for it. The player with the most points after 3 rounds is the winner and a dork.
The components for the game are very functional. You get a plastic tray with a dice grid inside, a transparent dome that you can put over the top of the tray to shake the dice around inside (making a wonderfully loud noise), 25 white wooden dice with a spread of letters on them. The common letters are more common, only a few q’s and z’s for example. You also get a small sand hourglass timer familiar from many other games, and some pads and wee little pencils. Using your own paper and pencils is recommended. The components I would say are pretty high quality, because the copy I played was over 20 years old and looked just fine.
This game has a small advantage over regular boggle. In regular boggle there are a great many 3 letter words that you can make, and lots of small patterns that you can only learn through playing a lot. An obvious example is LEE and EEL. Now nobody beside a few sailors uses the word lee anymore, but it is a powerful boggle word as there are lots of Es and Ls. There are a great number of ‘boggle only’ three letter words that an experience player will know and destroy a novice with. This is a similar situation with Scrabble and the two letter words. Big boggle lessens this problem somewhat by simply upping the letter count, meaning there will be fewer small weird words to find. I am sure that if played enough there would be a list of weird 4 letter ‘boggle only’ words, but they are harder to come by. This evens things up a little bit for the novice against the expert, though the expert will still win most of the time.
Bigger words are also more fun to make.
If you like regular boggle, it is worth the time to pick up big boggle. If you like word games boggle is a fun enough game to try out and see if you like it. If you dislike word games stay the hell away from this thing. If you like loud noises followed by 2 minute periods of complete silence, followed by people saying, “That isn’t a word, is it?” you should pick this up.
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Earth Chick
United States
Farmington Hills
Michigan
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Thanks for the review. It sounds good. i'm about to get it from someone on www.freecycle.org for FREE. You should check out freecycle. I had to check your review so i could see if it is something i want. I think it is. Thanks
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J Boyes
United States
Unspecified
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You're welcome!
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This game rocks. Still playing it every chance I get, although it's hard to find people who want to be slaughtered over and over! There are some good 4-letter "boggle only" words that keep popping up: CINE, TINE, LEER, REEL, SEER...the list goes on, depending on how loosely you define it. I particularly like STOP, because you can always get POTS and sometimes TOPS and SPOT and POST.
Get those suffixes!
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Lance Hampton
United States
Frisco
Texas
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Stinger of Catan wrote: This game rocks. Still playing it every chance I get, although it's hard to find people who want to be slaughtered over and over! There are some good 4-letter "boggle only" words that keep popping up: CINE, TINE, LEER, REEL, SEER...the list goes on, depending on how loosely you define it. I particularly like STOP, because you can always get POTS and sometimes TOPS and SPOT and POST.
Get those suffixes!
Don't forget OPTS.
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Albert Hernandez
United States
Greenville
South Carolina
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Great review.. I really like the sample game you made up with the scrabble icons.
The rulebook mentions the time is 3 seconds.
Cheers
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