Boggle Board Game: Rules for How to Play

Setup

Before you start the game, players should agree on how long to play the game. You can choose to play just one round, a series of rounds, or up to a number of points. There is no set end to Boggle. The players have to agree on how long they will play the game.
Each player takes a pen/pencil and a piece of paper to write answers on.
Place all of the letter cubes inside the grid, and place the cover on.
Place the sand timer in the middle of the table so everyone can see it.

How to Play Boggle

To start each round you will place all of the letter cubes in the grid base. Put the lid on and shake the dice so they move around and their sides are randomized. Shake the cubes for a while and make sure each falls into a place in the grid. You may have to shake the grid to make a cube fall into each spot in the grid.

Rolling the dice — A player has shaken the dice. The players will try to create as many words as they can with this layout of letters.

Once all of the player are ready, the timer is flipped over. Players will have three minutes to try and find as many words as they can. The lid is taken off the grid so the players can see all of the letters.

Each player then begins writing down as many words as they see spelled out in the grid. There is no limit to the number of words you can write down. In fact the more words you write down, the more you potentially increase the points you will end up scoring. See the Rules for Words section below for more details on finding words.

Write down word from grid — This player has come up with their first word, hill. In the second column you can spell hill by moving from top to bottom.

When the timer runs out, all of the players must immediately put down their pen/pencil as they cannot write down anymore answers.

Rules for Words

There are a number of rules that must be followed when writing down words that you find in the grid.

Each word must be at least three letters long.

The letters used to form a word must be adjacent to one another either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. All of the letters that form a word don’t have to be adjacent moving in the same direction. For example the first two letters can be adjacent horizontally, the third letter is then diagonal from the second letter, and the fourth letter is vertically adjacent to the third letter.

Finding words in the grid — The player has found a few more words in the grid. They created slime by starting with the S in the top right corner and then going left for the L, diagonal and to the left for the I and M, and then up for the E. Soup was created with the top right S, down for the O, diagonal and to the left for the U, and finally to the right for the P. Finally the word blur was formed starting with the B in the bottom left corner, moving right for the L, diagonally to the right for the U, and up for the R.

You can only use each letter cube once in a word. Basically you can’t loop around and use the same cube multiple times in one word.

Any word that is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc. can be used as long as it can be found in a English dictionary. This includes singular and plural words, and words in any tense. Proper nouns (names of people, places, etc.) are not allowed though.

Should you write down a word which has other words inside it, you can write down the smaller words as well. For example the word piece has the word pie inside it. You can write down both piece and pie.

Bonus Letters

Some of the letters in the game have a circle around them. These are bonus letters. When you use one of these words in a word, you will double the score of that word during scoring. Should you use multiple different bonus letters in a word, the multiplier increases. For example if you use two bonus letters in a word, you will multiply your score by four.

Scoring

The round ends when the timer runs out. At this time all of the players must immediately stop writing.

All of the players will read off the list of words that they wrote down. Whenever a player reads off a word that was wrote down by one or more other players, all of the players that wrote down the answer cross it off. You will compare answers by their spellings. If there is a word that has two or more meanings, it doesn’t matter which version of the word each player meant when they wrote it down.

Crossing off answers — This player had to cross off hill, soup, helm, lime, run, and rune because another player also wrote them down. They will not score any points for any of the crossed off answers.

Even if you find the same word spelled out two or more times in the grid, you can only potentially score points for it one time. If another player also writes down the answer, no one scores points for the word.

You can write down both the singular and plural form of a word and potentially score both of them if they aren’t wrote down by other players.

After the players have compared all of their answers, players will score points for each word on their list that wasn’t crossed off (no other players wrote it down). Words score points based on the number of letters in the word. If you use the Qu cube, it counts as two letters.

# of letters	3	4	5	6	7	8 or more
Points	1	1	2	3	5	11

Scoring in Boggle — This player ended up writing down four answers that no other players wrote down. They will score points for the answers as follows. They will score two points each from slime, prime, and prune because they are five letters long. Blur would normally only be worth one point. It uses two bonus letter though which multiplies the score by four to get to a total score of four. This player scores ten points this round.

Remember to double the value of a word if it uses one bonus letter. If the word uses two bonus letters, you will multiply the score by four and so on.

Winning Boggle

Boggle ends when the players have played the agreed upon number of rounds or a player reaches the agreed upon number of points.

When the game ends, all of the players will total their score during the game. The player that scores the most points wins the game.

Components

16 Letter Cubes
Grid and Lid
3 Minute Timer
Instructions

Year: 1972 | Publisher: Hasbro, Parker Brothers | Designer: Bill Cooke, Allan Turoff

Genres: Dice, Family, Word

Ages: 8+ | Number of Players: 1+ | Length of Game: 10-30 minutes

Difficulty: Light | Strategy: Light | Luck: Moderate

For more board and card game rules/how to plays, check out our complete alphabetical list of card and board game rules posts.

Written By:

Eric Mortensen

Eric Mortensen is an owner and head writer on Geeky Hobbies since 2014. He is an avid board game player and collector with over 3,000 board and card games in his collection. Since 2014 he has written more than 1,100 board game how to play guides.