Jumbulaya
Jumbulaya is a word game with a number of interesting twists.
For most of the game, only horizonal words matter, and new words
can be formed by forming anagrams, exchanging tiles, or adding new
tiles. The big twist is that forming a vertical word using one
letter per row is the main game-ending condition. Read the
complete rules here.
Anagrams are a major mind-twister, and finding the game-ending "jumbulaya" can be very challenging.
Dictionary:
Crosswords uses a dictionary derived from the open source program Collins Zyzzyva,
which has roughly 280,000 words considered acceptable for scrabble.
A smaller, ordered set of roughly 38,000 words, is considered
common enough for general use.
Robots:
the robots are simple "hill climbing" robots, that find the best
of immediately available words, but that is very effective when
armed with the complete dictionary. Weaker bots restrict the
vocabulary, but are still challenging. "Dumbot" uses approximately the 7,700 most common words, which is extremely effective in the opening stages of the game, but fades when longer words are required.
A Sad Note: Jumbulaya is commercially extinct, but you can still find copies on ebay from time to time. That's where I got mine.
|
|
