Word Game Solvers & Creativity Tools

This site started as a quick hack one Thanksgiving weekend; after a long drive to the beach, I wrote a little computer program to solve a riddle from a movie we were discussing on the way down. This little program grew into our first solver, a fast AJAX based web page which you can use to guess hangman words. We've been building out our collection of word game solvers ever since. This site has solvers for most of the traditional games (Scrabble, Boggle, Hangman). We also built customized versions of these solvers for the popular mobile games - such as a Hanging With Friends Solver and a Word With Friends Helper . These custom solvers take advantage of some special features in the rules of these games to get a better score.

We also have a small word game blog (blog articles here) which covers a wide range of topics related to word game analysis and UI design. Some of our favorite articles from the blog include:

• Our own attempt at finding the hardest words for hangman - even if you use a cheat program!. We played about 240,000 separate rounds of hangman in a computer simulator to identify which guessing strategies worked best. This analysis identified several sets of hangman words which look innocent but are extremely hard to guess!
• Hangman and Scrabble cheat programs are relatively sedate - take a couple of letters, do a fast dictionary search, pick a plausible word and place it on the board. We talk about how to balance these tools so the user doesn't get bored.
• Next up...the story about the UI design behind our Boggle solver! Zynga did something really smart with this version of the game - they included a fairly tight time limit on how long you can take per round. This makes writing a cheat program a real challenge (which we overcame). Through our work on the UI design, we were able to come up with a practical Scramble with Friends cheat program with a UI design that makes it easy to get letters into the tool and words out of the tool.