A few months ago, I was playing Boggle nearly every day with Alyx. Work and other circumstances have brought the frequency down, but we still play. It’s a good two-person game and you can fill up any amount of time you happen to have; we usually played a best-of-three series. All trash talk aside, she probably won a little more than half of our matches, although I think it’s been closer to even recently.

I find more words in most boards, and I tend to get a good start in the first 90-120 seconds (the round is 3 minutes), but I tend to find more short words and lose steam in the final minute. Alyx usually misses quite a few of mine, but is much likelier to find the big words that are worth 2, 3 or 5 points.

We play with the house rule that words that are formed just by adding an S to an existing word are illegal, both for nouns and verbs. We’re decent players, and this keeps the easy boards (with a good mix of common consonants and vowels) that happen to have an S from determining who writes fastest, since if these words were legal, you’d never have to stop. Adding –ES is fine as is –D or –ED or any other trivial-ish suffix. I suspect this rule slightly favors me, because I would typically gain only 1 point by adding a new word with an S, while Alyx could fairly often pick up an extra 3 or 5.

We also like to play with other people when they are around. Inexperienced people favor Alyx, because they’re more likely to find my short words than her long ones; experienced people don’t have a predictable influence, except that they will predictably be the scapegoat for the loser.

Like Scrabble, Boggle isn’t really about having a big vocabulary. In my experience, Scrabble is about strategic positioning, making the best of the letters you happen to get, and if you happen to be in a multiplayer game, sitting to the right of the weakest (or most reckless) player.

Instead of being about positioning and hooking onto existing words, Boggle is about quickly picking out familiar patterns from the jumble of letters, and recognizing that some patterns tend to imply the presence of others. For instance, if you have TOOL you definitely have TOO, LOO, and LOOT and you should look for other nearby words that like LOON, TOON, TOOT, POOL, etc. ATE is worth EAT and TEA as long as the letters are arranged in a triangle instead of a line. That’s my strategy, anyway. Alyx seems to find a lot of her good, long words by stemming off consonant blends like STR-, SCR, THR, and so on. With luck, she’ll share some of the rest of her secrets in a comment.