Boggle Rules — How to Play and Keep Score
Boggle is a three-minute scramble. Sixteen lettered cubes are shaken into a tray and every player, writing privately, lists as many words as they can trace through the grid before the timer runs out. The twist that makes it a game rather than a puzzle is cancellation: anything an opponent also found is worthless, so the winner is usually the person who found the words nobody else saw.
Overview
Boggle is a three-minute scramble. Sixteen lettered cubes are shaken into a tray and every player, writing privately, lists as many words as they can trace through the grid before the timer runs out. The twist that makes it a game rather than a puzzle is cancellation: anything an opponent also found is worthless, so the winner is usually the person who found the words nobody else saw.
Setup
Give every player a pencil and paper. Shake the cubes in the covered tray and set it down so all sixteen letters show. Agree the dictionary you will settle arguments with before you start.
How to play
Turn the timer over and everyone writes at once. A word is legal if its letters sit in an unbroken chain of adjacent cubes — sideways, up and down, or diagonally — and no single cube is used twice in the same word. The Qu cube counts as both letters. Plurals, verb forms and other inflections are all separate words. Stop writing the instant the timer runs out.
Scoring
Read the lists aloud one player at a time. Every word that appears on more than one list is crossed off all of them and scores nothing at all — not even for the player who found it first. Discard anything below the minimum length and anything the dictionary rejects.
Score what is left by length:
| Letters | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 or more |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Points | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 11 |
Big Boggle uses the same numbers but disallows three-letter words entirely. Super Big Boggle adds one extra rule at the top end: nine letters or longer scores two points per letter, so a ten-letter word is worth 20.
Add up the survivors and write that single number in the round for each player. A player who found nothing scores zero. Scores never go negative unless you have switched on a challenge penalty, which subtracts the set amount for each word successfully disputed.
Ending the game
Play the agreed number of shakes — three by default — then compare cumulative totals. Highest wins. If two players finish level, the tiebreak most groups use is one more shake between the tied players only. The app records the level finish as a shared win, so raise the number of shakes in match settings to open that extra round.
Common variations
Big Boggle and Super Big Boggle enlarge the grid and raise the minimum word length. Turning cancellation off makes for a gentler, higher-scoring game. Some groups play to a target score instead of a fixed number of shakes, continuing until somebody passes 50 or 100.
Scoring at a glance
| Who wins | Highest score |
|---|---|
| Rounds | 3 fixed |
| Score sheet | One number per player per round, with a running total |
| Typical round score | 0 – 40 |
| Negative scores | Never — scores only go up |
| Worth knowing | One number per player per shake — the total value of the words that survived cancellation. Players score the words themselves on paper and enter only the round total. |
Boggle — score sheet
Worked example
Settings: roundCount: 3, minimumWordLength: 3, duplicateCancellation: true,
scoringTable: classic, challengePenalty: 0. Players: Anna, Ben, Cara.
Each cell is one shake's total after cancellation — the words that nobody else also found, scored by length and added up on paper.
| Shake | Anna | Ben | Cara |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7 | 4 | 6 |
| 2 | 5 | 9 | 3 |
| 3 | 6 | 5 | 8 |
Where those come from, using the classic table above:
- Anna's shake 1 is a seven-letter word (5) plus a five-letter word (2) = 7.
- Ben's shake 1 is four short words of three or four letters, 1 each = 4.
- Ben's shake 2 is a seven (5) plus a six (3) plus a four (1) = 9.
- Cara's shake 3 is a seven (5) plus a six (3) = 8.
Running totals:
| After | Anna | Ben | Cara |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7 | 4 | 6 |
| 2 | 12 | 13 | 9 |
| 3 | 18 | 18 | 17 |
Expected standings after shake 3: Anna 18 and Ben 18 share rank 1 — both are
winners; Cara 17 at rank 3. finished: true.
What this catches:
The game ends on a round count, not on a score. Boggle has no target at all — the sheet finishes because the third shake was played. A scorer that only ever ends a match by comparing totals against a target never finishes a game of Boggle, and the match lands in History as abandoned.
Ranks 1, 1, 3 — the tie is reported, not broken. Anna and Ben are level, so both
hold rank 1 and the next rank skips to 3. winnerIds carries two ids. Quietly picking
one of them, or handing Cara rank 2, misrepresents a result the table can see for
itself.
Raising the shake count is what opens the decider. The tie-break in Ending the game
is one more shake between the tied players; with roundCount: 4 these same three rows
are no longer a finished match, and the fourth row settles it. The ending is a live
setting, so the sheet reopens the instant it is raised.
Cancellation happens before the cell, not inside the engine. The app never sees the word lists — it sees 7, 4 and 6. Anything the engine could do with duplicates has already been done on paper, which is why this game needs no scorer of its own.
House rules and settings
Every table plays Boggle a little differently. These are the 7 rules groups argue about. Each one is a setting in the app — and changing it recalculates a match that is already in progress, which is the thing no other score keeper does.
Number of shakes: what is the default in Boggle?
How many times the letter cubes are shaken before totals are compared. Three is the usual length for a casual game.
Default: 3. Adjustable from 1 to 20 in steps of 1.
In the app: “Number of shakes”.
Round timer: what is the default in Boggle?
How long each shake lasts, in seconds. The sand timer in the box runs for three minutes; Super Big Boggle uses four.
Default: 180. Adjustable from 30 to 600 in steps of 15.
In the app: “Round timer”.
Shortest word allowed: what are the options in Boggle?
Words shorter than this are not allowed at all. The bigger grids ban three-letter words because they are far too easy to find.
Default: 3 letters — classic Boggle. Two options:
In the app: “Shortest word allowed”.
Cancel duplicate words: on or off in Boggle?
Any word that appears on two or more lists is struck off every list and scores nothing for anybody. Turn it off and everyone simply scores whatever they found.
Default: on.
In the app: “Cancel duplicate words”.
Points for word length: what are the options in Boggle?
The table that turns word length into points. Longer words are worth disproportionately more in every version.
Default: Classic — 3 or 4 letters 1, 5 is 2, 6 is 3, 7 is 5, 8 or more is 11. Three options:
In the app: “Points for word length”.
Allow proper nouns: on or off in Boggle?
Normally names of people and places are not valid words. Some family games allow them to keep younger players in the hunt.
Default: off.
In the app: “Allow proper nouns”.
Penalty for a rejected word: what is the default in Boggle?
Points deducted when a word is challenged and turns out not to be in the dictionary. Leave at zero for the standard game, where a bad word simply scores nothing.
Default: 0. Adjustable from 0 to 5 in steps of 1.
In the app: “Penalty for a rejected word”.
Variants of Boggle
Big Boggle
A five-by-five grid of twenty-five cubes. Three-letter words are banned, and the extra row makes long words far more findable.
Super Big Boggle
A six-by-six grid with a four-minute timer, a four-letter minimum, and words of nine letters or more scoring two points per letter.
Solitaire scoring
Duplicates are not cancelled, so every player scores everything they wrote. Faster to settle and kinder to beginners.
Boggle is also known as
Big Boggle, Super Big Boggle, Boggle Deluxe. These are the same game — the rules and the score sheet above apply to all of them.
Keep score offline
The sheet above works in your browser. Cardzo for iPhone remembers your players, survives a closed tab, and works in a field with no signal.
Coming to the App Store.