SummarySummary

Voggle is a word game where you find words to clear tiles on the board. A new puzzle is available every day, which may be replayed.

Game playGame play

• Hold and drag over adjacent letters to form an English word.
• An amber button will show up if the word you find is valid. Click the button to remove the selected word and earn points.
• Dark tiles underneath the removed letters, if any, will be cleared. Random letters will fall from above to refill the board.
• You win when you manage to clear all 16 tiles within 15 moves.

ScoringScoring

While the winning condition is to clear all the tiles, a secondary objective is to maximize your average points per move (i.e. total score divided by the number of moves).

The longer a word is, the more points you earn.

Rare letters such as Q or Z give you bonus points. For example, the word JOY is worth 30 (base for three-letter words) + 7 (points for J) + 3 (points for Y) = 40 points.

The following letters have no extra points:
A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T, U.

Star ratingsStar ratings

Star ratings are based on your average points per move (PPM).

Word listWord list

Voggle's official word list contains more than 220,000 English words. It's compiled from multiple sources and covers most words that a competitive Scrabble tournament allows. It also includes widely accepted new words such as COVID and SATOSHI (the smallest denomination of bitcoin).

Proper nouns are generally not acceptable (e.g. SINGAPORE), except when they also happen to be regular words (e.g. CHINA).

Voggle is pro-inclusiveness and anti-censorship; therefore, it allows profane, vulgar, or derogatory words. Avoid playing those words if you find them offensive.

TipsTips

• Do not play Voggle in an incognito window which will not keep your history data when it's closed.
• Leverage adjacent prefixes and suffixes (e.g. UN-, CO-, DE-, RE-, -ER, -ED, -AL, -IC, -ING, -LY) to create longer words. Don't miss the opportunity to pluralize a word.
• Avoid creating clusters of vowels or consonants, especially in the bottom corners.
• Q's and Z's are hard to remove in general, but you may look for a word underneath them so that these pesky letters fall into non-blocking positions.
• It's not optimal to always clear the longest word, which may create an awkward position that worsens future moves. What ultimately matters to your rating is the average points per move, not the total score.
• The winning condition is to clear all the tiles, not all the letters. Under certain circumstances, however, you may choose to improve your average points per move or facilitate future moves without clearing any new tiles.
• Follow @voggle or join r/voggle to learn from the community and share your strategies.

RandomnessRandomness

New letters are generated in a humanly unpredictable but deterministic fashion (i.e. if you replay a puzzle and make the same moves, you'll get the same letters.)

Common letters such as E's and T's occur more frequently than Q's and Z's in general, though you may run into situations with no E's at all.

Voggle's random letter generation algorithm guarantees that the vowel-to-consonant ratio remains within a particular range. No drought of vowels or consonants will happen.

Voggle also caps the number of each letter on the board at any time. For example, you won't ever face three or more X's on the board.

Theoretically speaking, a deadlock with no possible moves can't be ruled out entirely. However, it's extremely unlikely to emerge even if you strive for it.

OriginOrigin

Voggle is designed and developed by Zhen Wang with help from friends and family. The name pays homage to Boggle, a classic word game invented half a century ago.

Voggle's core game mechanism is influenced by contemporary video games such as PopCap's Bookworm and Bonnie's Bookstore.

The a-puzzle-a-day concept has been taken from the playbook of Wordle.

Coronation Street, a British TV show, has featured a fictional web search engine with the same name, probably a parody of Google. That is purely a coincidence. But if you squint hard enough at Voggle, you can almost see a search engine for words.

Tech stackTech stack

Voggle is written in TypeScript using pixi.js. The web frontend is hosted on Cloudflare's Pages.