Boggle Plus (Game Boy)
Despite an interest in word games, I had no idea that Parker Brothers’s Boggle exists until I saw it in an episode of King of the Hill. The rules seemed simple and interesting, but I quickly realized one reason I never knew about it before then was that no one I talked to seemed to own it. It would be many years before I would actually get to play Boggle myself, but for people who might not be able to find other players interested or would just prefer a more portable version of the game, the Game Boy got an adaptation of the board game called Boggle Plus that not only featured modes for both solo and multiplayer play but also included a few different modes to grant it a bit more longevity and a unique appeal.
The basics of Boggle involve a set of cubes with a letter on each side being shaken and arranged in a grid. Standard play has 16 cubes kept in a 4 by 4 arrangement, the player needing to find words by linking together the letters that were rolled. Words must be three letters or longer with there being higher point values for longer words, but the placement of the cubes will inform how they can be connected. A player links together letters by picking a letter and then stringing it along to another that is touching it either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. While you cannot use a single cube more than once in making a word, you can make different connections rather than needing to stick to a direction like you would a word search. Every round of play takes three minutes to complete with the player trying to find as many words as possible, but when it is scoring time any word that was found by multiple players is cancelled out so only unique choices provide points. It is in some ways a more advanced and competitive form of a word search except there is no answer key, and to make the use of Q actually possible it instead exists as “Qu” so that there is actually hope for linking it together into a real word.
Boggle Plus keeps that enjoyable search and find aspect in its clean adaptation of the game, but one concern will definitely be that you’re at the mercy of the game’s programmed in set of words. There are some rather surprising omissions from its dictionary, the lack of slang terms, obscenities, and jargon that hadn’t really caught on by the game’s release year of 1992 understandable but “newt” certainly feels like it should be part of any word game’s dictionary. Luckily, during a round of Boggle Plus you can make your words without interruption, the game notifying you with a buzz if you already entered it but not slowing things down to tell you it doesn’t recognize one. The best part of Boggle Plus though has to be what happens at the end of the round, as any word you made it doesn’t recognize will be presented for your consideration. You are free as the player to declare if the word counts or should be stricken from the scoring round, not only meaning you can play words it doesn’t recognize in a way that avoids the game becoming dated but also might allow you to still score after an unintentional error when trying to make a word in a hurry. Admittedly you can use this as a way to cheat by telling the game a gibberish string is totally legitimate, but Boggle Plus is played mostly for the sake of enjoying the board game so it’s not like there’s any big incentive to play dishonestly.
In the game’s two fairly standard modes of play, Boggle and the Big Boggle variant where it has a 5 by 5 grid and only accepts words with 4 letters or more, you are able to play either single rounds or in a tournament format where you get to set the end point goal across multiple matches up to 300 points. You are able to play this with another human player or up to four computer controlled opponents, the eight characters you can select for them to play as essentially being their difficult settings. The old lady Pearl for example is a fairly skilled player, but the simple everyman Jim can sometimes barely find any words at all during a round. It certainly gives your opponents a touch more personality to have a little character portrait rather than a clear difficulty setting and actually probably closer resembles playing real people since it’s not like they’ll approach you and say they’re Easy mode. Unless you deliberately pick players weaker than you they can put up a good fight ensuring that any time you do have a hankering for a quick three minute word game you’ll actually be able to face some decent competition.
Boggle Plus is made more interesting by it’s three remaining modes, all of them still using the letter cubes but taking new approaches to how you play. Anagrams limits the cubes down to a pre-selected set that can only be combined to form one word, the player needing to look at the little jumble to figure out how they can be connected successfully. After finishing one you immediately move onto the next, the goal being to get as many done in three minutes as possible. Categories is a bit more interesting than that straightforward mode but also a bit more flawed, Categories also limiting your letter options to specific cubes selected by the game and giving you a topic for the kind of words you’ll need to find. These can be things like finding different kinds of instruments or stuff you’d find at an airport and are arranged in a way where you only have so many potential words to make, and while you don’t need to find every possible word that works for that topic, it can be difficult to parse what kind of words the game even expects. One of the categories is for skateboarding terminology in a then somewhat nascent sport where people were still figuring out the names for things and as such odd choices like Roadrash are the words you’re meant to find. Anagrams and Categories are both single-player challenges where you can pick your difficulty level though so if you are worried about the odder category picks you can avoid the higher levels, but it does feel like Categories missed some its potential by not sticking to topics where potential answers are more reasonable to think up.
The game’s last mode is another competitive one, Use All played with the 5 by 5 Big Boggle board but now adding in a feature where every time a letter cube is used to form a word, it disappears. Use All ends up one of the more strategic modes because of this, the player needing to avoid isolating letters from potential connections and sometimes even avoiding high scoring words because it could ruin their chances of clearing the grid. Clearing the grid does provide a point bonus, but if you do feel you are left without any more words to make you can rescramble the board up to three times before you are docked some Bonus Points. You don’t need to clear the board despite it having a solid pay out so you can hope your words are strong enough to carry you, Use All adding in extra variables to consider to make for a lightly tactical way to play the otherwise rather straightforward word game.
THE VERDICT: Besides a few problems with how Boggle Plus picks relevant words for its Categories mode, this adaptation of the Parker Brothers word game provides an enjoyable competitive twist on word searches while also adding in single player modes and AI opponents of varying skill levels to flesh out the experience more. A universal three minute round timer keeps the game moving quickly and makes trying to score high or solve the more puzzle-like extra modes more exciting for that pressure, but the ingenious option to let players decide if words that aren’t in the game’s dictionary should count makes Boggle Plus far less likely to become antiquated.
And so, I give Boggle Plus for Game Boy…
A GOOD rating. Take a good board game, include some extra features so it can still be entertaining even if you have to play it alone, and you have a solid video game on your hands. Boggle’s concept lends itself well to this, the competitive side of the game already not too interactive beyond cancelling out points if you pick similar words to your opponents so the AI can easily challenge the player without needing to make complex decisions. Boggle and Big Boggle alone probably would have still made this a fine adaptation for a Boggle video game, but the extra modes give you a few slightly different experiences and ones that can test you in different ways. Boggle is already essentially a more advanced form of anagram puzzles so a mode that pares it down to just that is a solid design even if it might not have the same legs as the pseudo-randomness of the letter cube shuffling in other modes, but Use All is able to make a more cerebral twist to regular Boggle as there’s a lot more at play when each words comes with a small price you must account for. Categories feels well-intentioned and the ability to skip them if you know one’s not going to go well does help it avoid being outright frustrating, but it is a little surprising the same game that has the foresight to let players temporarily allow words it doesn’t recognize also has a mode where the words it recognizes are so selective it can be hard for a player to pick up on what it’s going for.
Boggle Plus is about as good as the board game but with some extra ideas added over top of it so you can have reasons to play it even if you own the real deal. It probably won’t win over anyone who isn’t already a fan of Boggle’s concept but it also can serve as a more interesting entry point to the game than trying to wrangle a group of people together. Adding in the little extras and options for solo play means Boggle Plus can still have a purpose even as more video game adaptations of the game are made either officially or by imitators, and a game that takes three minutes to play is a sound fit for a portable game system to boot. Boggle on the Game Boy probably won’t draw in many modern day players just because that’s an odd way to get your Boggle fix, but it is certainly a solid realization of a fun word game and one with a bit more to give than the basics.