Friday, June 23, 2006

Scrabble Players Love their Words

I love making games. My team and I released our 5th game last month, Word Monaco Solitaire. It is our 3rd word game. After creating WordPop! I realized that I really miss creating word games. I use to create language arts software for children and it was so rewarding watching a child make the reading connection.

A few days ago an upgrade for Word Monaco Solitaire was released. This release was the result of urging from the Scrabble community. Scrabble players are VERY competitive. To be great players they've learned to make very abstract words. Many players rely on those words to get out of a jam or to get some really high scoring words. The word list used in our games has 83,000 plus entries but the majority of the words are classified as common. Words you would see in the newspaper, best selling fiction novels, and in movies. Scrabble players pointed out to me that sometimes the key for getting out of a jam in my games is often making a 2 or 3 letter word and they felt more were needed. So this last month, I gathered all the suggested words and expanded upon them.

Here is the work involved. If a word is suggested I check it first against several dictionaries to make sure the word does not conflict with several rules I have for adding a word.


1. The word can't be a name or any word that would require it to be capitalized.
2. It can't be an abbreviation or hyphenated, for that matter the word cannot have any punctuation associated with it, such as can't.
3. It is a real word or spelled correctly

Once it passes my test, I then need to locate all the forms of the word, such as its plural, inflection, tense. For example, if the word 'help' was suggested, I don't just add the word 'help' but I also add 'helps', helped', 'helping', 'helper' etc. Thus it is a lot of work to add each word.

Adding over 300 new words to Word Monaco Solitaire was a tremendous effort but a lot of fun. Many of the words being suggested are so unusual that I get a big kick finding out the definition of the word. Plus I really like being able to change my games based on user feedback. This is the best way to improve the game.

All in all, I hope all you Word Monaco Solitaire players really enjoy the new version. Try making some 2 and 3 letter combination and see if the letters stick. I think you will be surprised on some of the words you can make.

Keep those suggestions coming.