@botgle

@botgle is a bot that plays games of Boggle.

TIME FOR BOGGLE: Ｗ　Ｓ　Ｌ　Ｒ　 Ａ　Ｉ　Ｉ　Ｎ　 Ｇ　Ｂ　Ｗ　Ｓ　 Ｍ　Ｓ　Ｙ　Ｙ　 🎶 💫 🐉

— BoggleBot (@Botgle) July 6, 2015

The Rules

The rules are pretty simple:

• Just like in normal Boggle, there is a 4x4 grid of letters.
• The goal is to find as many words as possible in eight minutes.
• The game lasts for eight minutes, but the timer doesn't actually start until someone makes the first move.
• Words must be built from adjacent tiles - the tiles must be touching horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.
• Words must be at least three letters long.
• Once someone plays a word, no one else can play it.
• If you play a word that no one else has played, the bot will fav your tweet and send out a tweet with the words you found.

How To Play

It's easy! Just follow @botgle. There's four games a day, every six hours. When the game starts, tweet all the words you see in the grid at the bot. You can tweet more than one word at a time, and you can tweet as often as you like. The bot will reply with any valid words which haven't been played by another player. When the game is over, the bot will post the scores of everyone who played.

Notify Me Please!

If you would like to get DM notifications of upcoming games, DM 'NOTIFY' to @botgle, and it will send you a message 10 minutes before any games. If you DM it 'WARN', it will send you a message 1 minute before the game.

If you are getting notifications and they are annoying, DM 'STOP' to @botgle, and it will stop alerting you.

Scoring

• 3 and 4-letter words are worth 1 point.
• 5-letter words are worth 2 points.
• 6-letter words are worth 3 points.
• 7-letter words are worth 5 points.
• Longer words are worth 11 points

Code

The code for @botgle is on github. A good chunk of the code for the board itself is based on earlier work here. There's a bunch of ruby code for Boggle solvers out there and I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. That said, any errors here are almost certainly mine.

The code is a mess and I'll be cleaning it up over the next few weeks.