Anagrams is a classic word game of thought and thievery. For many players, including myself, their first encounter with Anagrams occurred at the end of a long day of playing tournament Scrabble™, but it has a long popular history as well. Originating in Victorian England (according to the Wikipedia article), the first published version dates to 1877 or earlier. It has been published in various tabletop versions over the years, one of which even made its way into a Hitchcock movie:
It can be played with any set of letter tiles, but until recently there has not been any way to play over the web. Now there at least three different ways to play: Jay Chan's mobile-friendly Snatch!, Carl Johnson's browser-based Anagrams Blitz, and the program on this page.
Gameplay is simple: A certain number of tiles are placed face down into a pool on the table. As they are turned over one at a time, players attempt to form words out of them. If a player is successful at finding a word, they arrange the tiles to spell out the word and place them in front of themselves. There is no penalty for guessing incorrectly.
Play continues as before, except that now it is possible to steal an existing word. This means adding one or more tiles from the pool to a word to form a longer word. If you steal your opponent's word, it's yours! You may also steal you own words to prevent anyone else from stealing them first.
There is one small catch, however. In order to make a steal, you must rearrange at least two of the tiles. For example it would be possible to steal LAUNCHPAD from CHALUPA, but you could not steal READING to form PREBOARDING because the latter can be spelled by inserting letters into the former without changing their order.
Scoring methods vary, but in general, the player with the most words a the end of the game win. Long words are awarded more points than short ones.
Those are the basics. But wait! There's more. Check out some these other amazing features:
Q | Can I change my password/username? |
A | Not at present, but you can always delete your account by clicking on your profile and afterwards reinstate it with the new data. |
Q | I'm confused about how the blank penalty works |
A | Blanks/wildcards are one of the more confusing aspects of the game, but they add a level of unpredictability and creative gameplay that would not otherwise be possible. Every time you use a blank, either by taking it from the pool and designating it or by changing it from an existing word you must take an additional P tiles from the pool where P is "blank penalty". For example, if the blank penalty is 2 and the minimum word length is 7, then in order to use a blank you would need to make at least a 10 letter word. You could do this two ways: either by taking 10 tiles directly from the pool or by taking an existing 7 letter word, adding one tile to it to make the steal, and then adding two more from the pool. Similarly the shortest playable word containing two blanks would have to be 13-letters in length. Moreover to change a blank you must take P tiles from the pool, so in the previous example example one could take the existing 10-letter word containing a blank, change the blank to something else, and add 2 tiles from the pool to make a 12-letter word. |
Q | Will other languages/lexicons be added? |
A | There are no plans to do that at present; however, the standalone Word Explorer app (coming soon) will allow you to set custom dictionaries . |
Q | I want to play, but there's no one else online. |
A | Play against a bot. Or start a club. The Woogles Anagrams Club meets Mondays at 8PM EDT. |
Q | Can I play more than one game at a time? |
A | At present gameplay is limited to one game per player, but you could have multiple games going in separate tabs. |
Q | Can I see who is watching a game? |
A | That feature will be added soon. |
Q | How do the robots work? |
A | There is a formula that calculates how often on average a robot will attempt to think of a word based on their skill level and the number of tiles in the pool. Also Genius bot knows all the words while Novice bot knows only common words found in the "Common English Lexicon", a subset of CSW21. (For more information on CEL, see here. Standard bot and and Expert bot will search in the larger wordlist 33% and 67% of the time respectively. |
Q | Is there any way to record my games for posterity? |
A | Yes! At the end of any game, click the "Download" button to save a text file containing the recap or an animated gif image. |
I am an amateur Java programmer, mostly self taught, as well as an avid Scrabble player. I built this project almost entirely from scratch over the course of several years as a way of learning to program and giving back to the word game community. Many, many hours were spent reading the Java Docs and scouring Stack Overflow for answers.
Since I have benefited greatly from the advice and code of others, I have made this an open source project. Check out the code over at my GitHub page, and feel free to use what you like in your own work. (Just no redistributing or selling without my permission, of course.) If you are an experienced prorgammer, any bug reports or feedback on how I can improve things would be greatly appreciated!
© Christopher C. Grubb 2023
It is believed that the name "Anagrams" and game concept and rules are in the public domain; however, I claim copyright over my implementation as well the underlying source code. This is a free product, so any user is allowed to distribute the installer freely as long as they keep it free. Any modifications intended for public distribution, however, are forbidden without express consent of the copyright holder.