Anagram Game

One puzzle, three right answers

ALERT, ALTER and LATER are the same five letters. So are EARLY, LAYER and RELAY. The five-letter list behind this board holds 662 words, which resolve to 626 distinct sets of letters, and 34 of those sets have more than one answer: 32 of them pairs, two of them triples. Seventy of the 662 words sit inside one of those sets, so a ten-round game runs into one more often than it misses.

This is the thing an anagram game is most likely to get wrong, and it fails invisibly. Store one target word, compare the player’s string against it, and somebody who types ALTER at a puzzle where the machine privately settled on ALERT is told he is wrong. He is not wrong. Here a guess is tested for membership in the set of every listed word made of those letters, never for equality with a single stored answer, so all three land as correct and the board does not have a favourite.

Solve one of them and the message names the others, so you learn the siblings you did not think of. Skip does the same thing in reverse and lists every word those letters spell, because a player who surrenders on ALERT and is shown only LATER walks away believing the board cheated him. Rounds are also keyed by their sorted letters rather than by the word itself, which is why ALERT and LATER can never both turn up inside one game: ten rounds are ten genuinely different puzzles.

The tiles never already spell it

Before an arrangement goes on the screen it is tested against every accepted answer for those letters, not merely against the one that was drawn. Showing ALTER as the scramble for ALERT would be a solved puzzle sitting there in plain sight even though the two strings are not equal, and that test is the only thing that catches it.

The same test caps how many letters may stay where they started, which on a five-letter word means one. That matters more than it sounds. The average number of letters a random shuffle leaves standing in their original place is exactly one, whatever the length of the word, so an unchecked shuffler serves near-misses constantly, and of the 120 arrangements of five distinct letters only 44 move every single one. Shuffle again re-runs the whole check while the tray is still full, so a re-shuffle cannot quietly hand you the answer either.

Every control on the board

Check, Hint, Shuffle again, Clear, Skip, Next word and New round, with the round counter and your running score on the line above the tiles. Check wants all five letters placed before it will judge anything, so a shorter word made from some of them is not the game. Hint is limited to two per word. Next word appears only once the word in front of you is solved.

Nothing here needs a mouse. Type the word and the letters walk out of the tray in the order you name them. Backspace lifts the last letter you placed back into the tray, Escape returns everything you put down yourself while leaving any hinted letter locked where it is, and Enter checks your answer and then moves you on to the next round. Arrow keys step along the tiles, and every slot announces its own position and contents aloud, so the whole game is playable from the keyboard alone.

Three word boards, and which one to be on

The three boards no longer draw the same words, and the pool is now most of what separates them. This one is pinned to five letters and nothing else, 662 of them, which is exactly where the sets with more than one right answer concentrate: seventy of these words sit inside such a set, against thirty-two on the six-and-up board, and both of the triples are here. That is why this page is the one about the list itself and about what a scoring routine has to do to be fair to it – the thirty-four sets, and the check that stops the tiles from already spelling one of them.

The anagram puzzle page starts at six letters and never drops below it, 757 words, and that is a different problem rather than a harder version of this one: at that length you stop reading the word straight out of the tray and start working it out, so the page is written as method – which end of the word to build from, what to count before you move a tile, and what the Hint button does with a word that has more than one answer. The word scramble page takes the whole list, all 1,419 words from five letters to eight, so the length changes from round to round and you do not know which you are getting until the tiles land. It is also the only one of the three with a clock, and it is the one to be on when what you want is a number to beat rather than a word to learn.

What the three still share is the shape of the game: ten rounds, two hints a word, a scramble tested before it ever reaches the screen, and a guess judged by membership in the set of every listed word those letters spell. Any of them is an anagram game online in the sense the phrase usually means: nothing to install, nothing to sign into, and the words made up on the spot.

How the scoring works

A solved word pays its length minus the hints you took, and never less than one point, because a round that pays nothing after a hint teaches you to stop pressing the button that keeps you in the game. Five letters solved cold is five points, one hint makes it four, two makes it three. A word you skip pays nothing at all. Ten rounds means fifty is a clean sweep, and a score in the forties means you took a handful of hints and still knew most of them.