Shake Your Way to a Better Vocabulary
Written: Jan 03 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: lots of fun, improves your vocabulary
Cons: can lose dice, can have arguments over whether words are valid
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| quasar's Full Review: Boggle |
One of my mother's many professional incarnations is English teacher, and from a young age word games were prevalent in my house. I played math and logic games with dad and word games with mom. All were happy.
Our favorite game was Perquacky, but close behind was Boogle. Boggle is a very simple game. The basic setup has 16 dice in a 4x4 grid. Each die has a letter on each side. You shake the dice to scramble them then let them settle into a grid position. Every once in a while you have to manually set a few errant dice into place, but most of the time you can just shake them into place. Once they settle, you have three minutes to make as many words as you can.
The rules for making words are straightforward. Each word must have at least 3 letters. To compose the words you can start from any letter on the grid. Subsequent letters must touch the previous letter (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally). You cannot reuse a letter within a specific word. No slang or foreign words are allowed, but plurals are fine. In fact, you could safely use bar, bars, and barred as long as all three words can be composed using a continuous string of letters.
The game has an added twist, though. You only get points for the words that are unique to your list. After the three minutes are up, every player must read the words on his or her list. If another player has that word it is crossed off of both lists. This means that you want to both find the common words so no one gets credit for an easy word and find more unusual words others may not find to get some points yourself.
Some argument can ensue during the word comparison stage; I highly recommend keeping a dictionary handy to check on more obscure words. Give the dictionary last word - it's hard to argue with.
I've seen a few different variations on scoring. The most common scoring is one point for three or four letter words, two points for a five letter word, three points for a six letter word, and so on, adding one point for each additional letter.
Playing Boggle can greatly increase a child's vocabulary, especially when they play against adults. When I first started playing my mom found all sorts of words I had never seen before. This gave her the opportunity to tell me what they meant and I soon found myself using some of them in everyday conversations. As time went on, I started finding more and more of these words myself when playing. I was having fun and learning at the same time. You can't beat that.
Recommended:
Yes
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