WHAT, Wolfberg's Helpful Anagramming Tool, is really a toolbox of powerful tools, with many facilities. You can make effective use of WHAT right away by using just a few of its features, and this document introduces how to work with tiles on Scrabble® or Super Scrabble® boards. If you have not yet read any documentation for this program, you may find it better to first read "WHAT's First - Getting Started Using WHAT", but if you are specifically interested in working either of these game boards, read this document.
WHAT supports working with a 5 x 5 Game, which is based on the commercial game of Big Boggle®. This game is currently made by Winning Words. The game used to be manufactured by Parker Brothers and Hasbro. Players seek words formable from 25 cubes which are shaken up and then settled into a 5 x 5 grid arrangement. Support for this game is restricted to English and French lexicons; Spanish lexicons cannot be used for this game. The Word-Building Game, which is described in the WHAT User Guide, is supported for English, French, and Spanish tiles and lexicons.
You can use bring up a 5 x 5 Grid Word Game Dialog in one three ways:
Along with the /G command you can provide up to 25 tiles for initial setting into the grid. These tiles are specified following the /G. As part of the specification of the tiles, you may include one tile which represents a digram, namely two letters. In order to specify a digram tile, type the second letter of the digram in the alphabetic case different than the first letter. Typically, you will type lowercase letters for the tiles, and so the second letter of the digram should be in uppercase. Note that the syntax to specify a digram tile when inputting a grid within the player dialog - it employs the use of an equal sign. When setting up a grid via the /G command, the grid is accepted as if you provided the specification of the tile in the dialog. You must then click the OK button in the player dialog to settle on having WHAT accept that grid.
When you bring up the dialog using either of the other two methods, if you had previously seen the dialog, it is shown in the same state it was when you last saw it.
You can have WHAT produce a random 5 x 5 grid according to the cubes that come with such a game; to do this click the New Grid button. Alternatively, you can provide your own grid; to do this click the Input a Grid button. If you are playing, you may want to use the timer, that is available on the Timer tab in the upper right corner of the WHAT window.
If you then want to solve the grid, click the Solve button on the 5 x 5 Grid Game Dialog, and a command line is made up for you to submit as a WHAT query. The line ends in "/B/@|", that indicates it is a grid query and scoring style is for this kind of grid game, where scoring is based on length. If you want to see scores, both the total and for the individual words, augment the line with a "$" (unless presentation of scores is already set for the long-term). You can also augment the query with subcommands, such as other slate presentation subcommands, or you can just present the slate using current settings for presentation. Consider sorting according to word length. When the 5 x 5 Grid Game Dialog goes away, its contents are not lost, so you can bring it back to see it.
You can click the Boggle Options button to set these user-configurable options:
The source of words used for solving this game is the current primary lexicon. If you have changed the word source to a wordlist, that does not affect the source for such solving.
All grids are remembered during a WHAT session, so you can go back to look at grids previously generated or specified.
When you specify a grid, you would typically type the 25 letters in order, row by row, but you may place the cursor at a grid position by clicking the mouse there, or you can use the arrow keys to move the cursor.
The WHAT Initialization File is mostly described in the WHAT User Guide, but the two sections pertaining to Boggle® are included here, in order to have all the Boggle® information in one document. These are those sections of the WHAT Initialization file.
The [BOGGLE] section of the WHAT initialization file can be used to specify settings of the user-settable options for playing Boggle®. Individual lines in this sections are optionally: