Boxlingual’s Humble Beginnings

Boggle is arguably the most fun word game out there. I fell in love with the game after playing the game at family events with my cousins, aunties, and uncles. It is now a right of passage to be accepted in my family. Every time one of the cousins brings a significant other to a family event, the significant other is “encouraged” to play Boggle with aunties and uncles to prove their intellect.

We don’t play with the standard 3+ letter word rule; we actually play with a minimum of 5 letters to keep players thinking. Another twist is we don’t use the letter “S” at the end of words for plural and present tense conjugation. It would be way too easy to double dip words and to make 4 letter words reach the 5 letter minimum.

I would always lose when playing boggle with the bright minds of my family, so I had to bend the rules a bit. They admire the use of intellectual words such as “sonar” and “lunar”, and look down on words such as “tooter.” I’d find myself using low level words to gain easy points and they would just roll their eyes. Another method I used was using slang. Words the uncs would not think of like “gucci.” Whenever a slang word was played, I would have to defend against the senate (they would almost always allow me to play these words because I was one of the weakest players).

I only won one time. I cheated. I took a picture of the boggle board, snuck out of the table because I said there were too many people, and entered the letters into a Boggle solver at a seclusive location. Quickly I jotted down words like crazy, but I also made them believable. No fancy schmancy chemical formulas and overlyscientific words that I would not know. After five minutes, I went back to the main table and showed everyone off. They were impressed. We played another round and I didn’t cheat because I felt bad. I promptly lost and everybody called my last win as a fluke. From that day I wanted to become better at the game as I only played with my family.

I don’t own Super Big Boggle so I created my own version, Boxlingual. Boxlingual is a faithful recreation of Super Big Boggle, down to the dice and letters being used. This way I could practice by myself. The scoring and ruling system had been reworked from my family’s house rules. Three letter words are now allowed for more fun, but to encourage users to think more, points are awarded at an exponential rate. I’ve seen players score 3,000+ points in some games. The rules are more relaxed as past and present tense words simply ending with an “s” are also allowed. Boxlingual is dedicated to my family of hardcore Boggle gamers. Thank you everyone for checking Boxlingual out and supporting my game!