A Programmer's Analysis of Boggle

In the era of modern tabletop games such as Apples to Apples, Dixit, Sushi Go, Hive, Zombie Dice, and Tokaido (all great games), the classics are often left behind. While many of these games deserve to be forgotten (Monopoly, Jenga, Risk, Life, and Snakes and Ladders; just to name a few), the venerable Boggle still reigns as one of the few great word games. Boggle has a lot to offer: it is a fast paced game that scales well to many players, everyone plays at the same time, winning requires skill (pattern recognition and a decent vocabulary) and strategy (trying to find words that other players aren't likely to spot) rather than luck, and it has a high replay value (every game is different). It is also easy to level the playing field for younger players, e.g. by counting their words even if found by other players or reducing the value of longer words.

Boggle is interesting from a programmer's perspective as well. While crafting an algorithm to efficiently find all of the words in a Boggle game is pretty straight forward, answering questions such as:

• What is the average number of words/points in a game and how does this differ between different  sets of dice?
• What percentage of total points do 3-letter words constitute? 4-letter words? Etc.
• How can we determine whether a given arrangement constitutes a valid board for a particular game?
• How many words in a given dictionary cannot be spelled using any possible arrangement of the provided dice?
• What is the highest scoring Boggle board?

are more challenging and require the use of non-trivial algorithms and data structures. A couple years ago, I wrote a program explore these questions (and others) called Word Game Solver (WGS for short) and documented the results which are presented below. While the details of the program itself will not be the focus here, I will provide the commands used when applicable so that others can reproduce/expand on the results presented and will also touch on the algorithms employed.  Comprehensive pdf documentation is provided with the program (available on GitHub) for those who are interested in the full scope of the functionality provided.

About Boggle

The Boggle game consists of 16 6-sided dice, each side containing a letter. The dice are shuffled and arranged onto a 4x4 grid where players are given 3 minutes to find as many words as possible by stringing together adjacent letters from the top face of each die. Words may be 3 letters or longer and a die cannot be used more than once in the formation of a word. Scoring is based on the length of the word. Players only score points for words that nobody else finds, encouraging the scouting out of less familiar words. Dictionary words are allowed, proper nouns and contractions are not.

Boggle was originally launched in 1973 and there have been over a dozen official versions released over the last 40 years. Changes include different letters printed on the dice and different board sizes including a 5x5 version and, more recently, a 6x6 version (Super Big Boggle). There are now dozens of popular variations available in digital form including Zynga's “Scramble with Friends” and MAG Interactive's “Ruzzle”, both of which incorporate letter values and letter and word multipliers into the scoring. Sven Studios' “Word Hero” is another popular variation that uses letter values and a score multiplier based on word length.

All of these games share the same basic characteristics: a square grid of letters, usually populated from (virtual) dice where the goal is to obtain the highest score by finding as many words as possible.  WGS can be used to solve and answer questions about any of these games, many of which are pre-configured in the stock distribution of WGS.  While the focus here will be on two versions of 4x4 Boggle, the same principles apply to similar games.

Finding the Words

The first order of business is constructing a list of valid words on a given board for analysis.  This is not a particularly difficult problem and there are two common approaches: 1) iterate through a dictionary trying to find a spelling for each word on the board and 2) walk the board building up letters and check each combination against a dictionary. I went with the second approach. The basic idea is to build a trie from the dictionary at the beginning and then walk the game grid, consulting the trie at each step to determine if the current path could potentially lead to a valid word (in other words, is the current set of letters a prefix of a word in the dictionary). If a given path consists of letters that do not form the prefix of any word, that path is not explored further (it is pruned). This path-pruning is essential for the algorithm to work efficiently as the vast majority of paths do not leads to valid word prefixes.

As words are found, the current path is processed by a scoring function which produces a solution object which is added to the solution list. It is necessary to keep the path for scoring purposes (some games use letter-multipliers so two instances of the same letter may need to be treated differently) as well as certain analysis purposes (requesting the number of words that can be formed using the die at a specific position). When the solution list is built, the provided command determines how it is used: the solve command will display the solutions using the provided format and the analyze command will output the requested board statistics. It is possible to analyze about 2000 boards per second on a modern CPU core and the work is very easily distributed across multiple cores.

Generating and Analyzing the Boards

With a mechanism to find words, scoring and analyzing the words found is straight-forward, the same configuration file that describes the game dice and board geometry also describes the scoring rules. The WGS program has a create command which uses a Fisher-Yates shuffle to generate a random board based on the dice configured for a particular game. The analyze command solves boards and provides the specified information for each board. Used together, the create and analyze operations make it possible to easily generate and analyze a large number of random boards.

The 4x4 versions of Boggle manufactured prior to 1992 all use one set of letters printed on the dice, the versions made in 1992 and since use another. The configuration that comes bundled with the WGS program contains both of these, referred to as “Boggle (Old)” and “Boggle (New)”. For this analysis, one billion random boards were generated for each die configuration using a command that looks something like this (the actual work was parallelized but the command is equivalent to the one used):

wgs wgs.json create "Boggle (Old)" 10000000000 | wgs wgs.json analyze "Boggle (Old)" "%B %C %S %3C %4C %5C %6C %7C %8+C\n" dump-words >board_data.txt 2>word_data.txt

The first part of the command pipeline generates a billion random boards and the second part runs them through the solver which will output, for every board, a line containing the information requested in the format string: the board letters, the number of unique words found, the total score of those words, and the number of 3-letter words, 4-letter words, 5-letter words, 6-letter words, 7-letter words, and 8+-letter words. A list of all words found along with a count of each word will also be printed to stderr via the dump-words option. The board_data.txt file looks something like this:

TLEOWSAITEZPNSYI 191 285 53 70 48 17 3 0

TMNTWAHEXFVLSGTE 101 132 47 37 13 2 1 1

GLLASUERSASEVTIC 273 429 68 101 68 28 8 0

VOONTLNIHJSGYHAD 108 158 41 40 18 5 3 1

ASMREHNAJTTIYLYN 133 193 45 43 32 12 1 0

...

And the word_data.txt looks something like this:

AAH 39833743

AAHED 3050316

AAHING 162183

AAHS 11656084

AAL 35165324

…

This data is then processed by various custom aggregators to produce statistics and generate graphic representations of the data.

Note: The notation used to represent an individual boggle board is a string of 16 letters which are meant to be populated in a 4x4 board left-to-right, top-to-bottom.  For example NNICSEDRMAREBOTS represents the board:

Below are the two different die configurations analyzed, each set of 6 letters represents the 6 sides of one die.

Boggle Old Dice

AACIOT, AHMORS, EGKLUY, ABILTY, ACDEMP, EGINTV, GILRUW, ELPSTU, DENOSW, ACELRS, ABJMOQ, EEFHIY, EHINPS, DKNOTU, ADENVZ, BIFORX

Boggle New Dice

AAEEGN, ELRTTY, AOOTTW, ABBJOO, EHRTVW, CIMOTU, DISTTY, EIOSST, DELRVY, ACHOPS, HIMNQU, EEINSU, EEGHNW, AFFKPS, HLNNRZ, DEILRX

The SOWPODS dictionary was used to score the randomly generated boards.

Results

	Boggle Old	Boggle New
Avg Words	122.99	133.62
Std Dev	61.51	66.58
Avg Score	171.79	193.88
Std Dev	108.7	123.8

A Boggle New board averages about 133 words for a total of about 193 points, a modest increase from older versions of the game.  The graphs below show the word count and point total distributions of both versions of the game.

Boggle Old Word Length Stats

Word Length	Frequency	Percent of words	Percent of Points
3-letter words	45.59	37.07%	26.54%
4-letter words	45.54	37.03%	26.51%
5-letter words	21.91	17.82%	25.51%
6-letter words	7.652	6.222%	13.36%
7-letter words	1.893	1.539%	5.51%
8-letter words	0.349	0.2838%	2.235%
9-letter words	0.04709	0.03829%	0.3015%
10-letter words	0.004769	0.003878%	0.03054%
11-letter words	0.0003689	0.0002999%	0.002362%
12-letter words	2.187e-05	1.778e-05%	0.00014%
13-letter words	9.61e-07	7.814e-07%	6.154e-06%
14-letter words	2.7e-08	2.195e-08%	1.729e-07%

Boggle New Word Length Stats

Word Length	Frequency	Percent of words	Percent of Points
3-letter words	46.56	34.84%	24.01%
4-letter words	49.02	36.68%	25.28%
5-letter words	25.47	19.06%	26.28%
6-letter words	9.495	7.106%	14.69%
7-letter words	2.502	1.872%	6.452%
8-letter words	0.4965	0.3716%	2.817%
9-letter words	0.0734	0.05493%	0.4165%
10-letter words	0.007964	0.00596%	0.04519%
11-letter words	0.0006584	0.0004928%	0.003736%
12-letter words	4.271e-05	3.196e-05%	0.0002423%
13-letter words	2.049e-06	1.533e-06%	1.163e-05%
14-letter words	7.7e-08	5.762e-08%	4.369e-07%
15-letter words	2e-09	1.497e-09%	1.135e-08%

There is not a major difference in the word length stats between the two versions.  3-letter and 4-letter words are each worth 1 point in Boggle and together they comprise about 70% of the words and 50% of the points on an average board.  5-letter and 6-letter words, worth 2 and 3 points respectively, account for about 25% of the words and 40% of the points.  A little less than half of all boards contain an 8-letter word, the chance of a longer word occurring decreases by about a factor or 10 for each letter beyond 8.

Best and Worst Boards

Boards with No Words

146,909 Boggle Old boards (about one out of every 6800 boards) and 134,641 (about one out of 7400 boards) Boggle New boards had no words. An example of such a board is:  WKTMSDTCVMRNDTFQ

Word Dense Boards

The Boggle (Old) board with the highest number of words found (842) was:  ALESSTIDTERANAME and is worth 2126 points.  Out of a billion Boggle (Old) boards, only 15 had 800 words or more.

The Boggle (New) board with the highest number of words (906) was: TLGNAEIASTRSDEHB which is worth 2566 points.  This was the only Boggle (New) board to have 900 or more words, 31 boards had 800 or more words.

Highest-scoring Boards

The Boggle (Old) board with the highest number of points (2447) was: DSLRETAIPRNTUDES It was the only board to break the 2400 point barrier and only one of 23 boards containing 2000 points or more. The board contains 790 words including 72 words with 8 or more letters.

The Boggle (New) board with the highest number of points was (2567) was: TSLNEIAENTRTBESO

Board Validation

By “board validation” I mean determining whether it is possible to create a given board grid using a given set of dice. For example, Boggle only has one 'Z' so any board containing more than one Z is not valid. Similarly, any board with two 'B's is not a valid Boggle (New) board, the dice for recent versions of Boggle contain two 'B's but they are both on the same die so it is not possible to have them both appear on the same board.

     XLRV

     VENT

     SSFC

     CUMB

    Is this a valid Boggle board?

Board validation is useful for verifying user input (the WGS GUI does this for manually entered boards). Board validation allows us to answer questions like “What percent of Boggle (Old) boards are also valid Boggle (New) boards?” and vice versa as well as the calculate the chance that a random string of letters constitutes a valid Boggle board, the latter which will yield an estimate of the number of distinct Boggle boards. Finally, analyzing this problem sets the foundation for the next section.

This kind of board validation is a classic bipartite matching problem in which we seek to find the maximum matching between a set of dice and a given board. If the maximum matching consists of the entire provided board, the board is valid, otherwise it is not. Note that it is possible to validate a partial board, that is ZZ is in invalid partial board and AB is a valid partial board. Note also that there may be multiple ways to construct the board using the dice, some algorithms can provide one or all solutions, others will simply tell us if the board is valid.

Bipartite matching representation of a potential Boggle board

There are several ways to solve the maximum bipartite matching problem including the venerable augmenting paths algorithm and the Hopcroft-Karp algorithm. The problem can also be reduced to a max-flow problem and solved with an algorithm such as Ford-Fulkerson which is how WGS does it.

Maximal matching shows this is a valid board

The following command will create a million random Boggle New boards and validate them against the Boggle Old dice. The stats option will cause validator stats to be printed at the end which will provide the information we need.

wgs wgs.json create "Boggle (New)" 1000000 | wgs wgs.json check-board "Boggle (Old)" stats >/dev/null

The same command can be used to perform the opposite by swapping “New” and “Old”.

About 90.4% of valid Boggle (New) boards are also valid Boggle (Old) boards.

Only about 51.5% of valid Boggle (Old) boards are also valid Boggle (New) boards.

8.47% of random strings of 16 letters are valid Boggle (New) boards, 26.6% are valid Boggle (Old) boards. Below is a breakdown of the chance that a random n-letter string can be formed using Boggle dice.

Percent of random strings that represent valid Boggle Boards

Random String Length	Boggle (Old)	Boggle (New)
1	100%	100%
2	99.2%	98.3%
3	97.4%	95.2%
4	94.9%	90.8%
5	91.7%	85.3%
6	87.8%	78.8%
7	83.4%	71.7%
8	78.6%	64.3%
9	73.3%	56.6%
10	67.8%	48.7%
11	61.9%	41.1%
12	56.0%	33.7%
13	49.8%	26.9%
14	43.4%	20.6%
15	36.5%	14.5%
16	26.6%	8.5%

Since every English letter is represented at least once on both Boggle dice variations, 100% of 1-letter strings are valid partial boards. Most of the 2-letter combinations are valid for both versions.  JJ, QQ, XX, and ZZ are not valid for either version as only one of each of these letters exists on the dice.  JQ is not valid for the older version as J and Q appear on the same die.  In the newer version, BB, FF, KK,  BJ, FK are not valid; the two Bs as well as the J exist on the same die and the two Fs exist on the die that contains the only K.

Distinct Boggle Boards

The results of board validity for random 16-letter strings can be used to obtain an approximation of the number of distinct Boggle boards. The number of ways to permute 16 letters is 26^16, multiplying this by .266 or .085 yields an approximation for the number of distinct boggle boards using the old and new die configurations, respectively. Thus there are roughly 1.16e22 Boggle Old boards and about 3.69e21 Boggle New boards (not accounting for rotations, reflections, and other transformations).

Word Checking

A particularly interesting question, at least from an algorithmic standpoint, is “What words cannot be spelled using any possible valid board?”. We already know from above that the words like BABY cannot be spelled because both of the letter 'B's in a newer Boggle game are on the same die. The percent of words that can be spelled with a particular die set is one factor to consider in determining the efficacy of a configuration, the other being the average words per board. A reasonable goal when designing the letters for each die would be to strike a balance between relatively high-scoring boards and being able to form a substantial set of words. A game which provides an average of 10 words per board won't be very satisfying but neither will a game that provided more words with lots of repetition across different boards due to few overall unique word possibilities.

One the surface, this appears to be the same problem as partial board validation and in many cases it is. There is a subtle difference though that is exposed when we try to use this solution with dice that contain multiple letters on a face. For example, all 4x4 Boggle versions contain a “Qu” face and some of the 5x5 Boggle versions contain a die that has other two-letter combinations such as “In”, “Er”, and “Th”. When multiple letters appear, all of the letters must be used, in the provided order, to spell a word with that die. For example, there is a “Qu” face but no “Q” and as such words like BURQA cannot be spelled using the traditional rules.

The problem with multiple letters is that they turn the spell-able question into one that can no longer be solved using bipartite matching because the target word no longer has a single spelling but instead has multiple spellings. For example, consider the word THEREIN when, in addition to single letters, the combinations Th, Er, and In are available. There are now 8 distinct ways to spell this word:

T H E R E I N

T H E R E In

T H Er  E I N

T H Er  E In

Th  E R E I N

Th  Er  E In

Th  Er  E I N

Th  E R E In

The problem is no longer one of a single bipartite matching but a group of such problems, the size of which can quickly explode for certain multi-letter combinations.

With the addition of multiple letters per die, the spell-able question turns into a set cover constraint satisfaction problem. This is an NP-complete problem which has no known general method of solving  in less than super-polynomial time. While it may be tempting to create a special case for Qu as this is the only multi-letter combination used by the 4x4 versions of Boggle, this doesn't allow for support of customizable die configuration with arbitrary multiple letters.

Luckily there are several optimizations that can be performed that allow this to work well in practice. We start out by using Ford-Fulkerson, as before, and fall back to solving the set cover problem (WGS uses Knuth's Algorithm X to do this) only when no solution is found and at least one of the dice contains a multi-letter face which is a substring of the word we are trying to form. We also quit as soon as a solution is found and can perform checks such as ensuring that the length of the target word is not longer than the longest letter that can be formed using the provided dice. While it is possible to manufacture circumstances in which the analysis of a word will take a substantial amount of time, this doesn't occur when checking any of the 4x4, 5x5, or 6x6 Boggles against any of the popular dictionaries.

We can determine whether a given word can be spelled with a given dice configuration using the WGS's check-word command which will output the provided word with a leading minus if it cannot be spelled and a leading plus sign if it can.  A whole dictionary can be checked for words that cannot be spelled like so:

wgs wgs.json check-word "Boggle (Old)" < /usr/share/dict/words|grep ^-

The results of checking several Boggle versions against three popular dictionaries is provided in the below table.

Number of words that cannot be spelled on any board

	TWL06 178,691 words	SOWPODS 267,651 words	ENABLE1 172,820 words
Boggle (Old)	913	1563	3345
Boggle (New)	9789	15299	12004
Big Boggle (1979)	8529	13658	9078
Boggle Master	9055	13623	8510
Big Boggle (2011)	9135	13848	8715
Super Big Boggle	340	539	297

Some observations about the data include:

• SOWPODS and TWL06 contain no words with a length of more than 15 letters.
• ENABLE1 contains 4274 words of 16 letters or longer.
• Almost all of the 15-letter words can be spelled using the Boggle (Old) dice.
• There are 16 17-letter words that can be spelled using the Boggle (Old) dice, they are: ACQUAINTANCESHIPS, ACQUISITIVENESSES, CONSEQUENTIALNESS, COUNTERQUESTIONED, DISEQUILIBRATIONS, DISQUALIFICATIONS, INCONSEQUENTIALLY, INQUISITIVENESSES, PICTURESQUENESSES, PREQUALIFICATIONS, QUADRICENTENNIALS, QUARRELSOMENESSES, QUATERCENTENARIES, QUATTUORDECILLION, SESQUICENTENARIES, and SESQUICENTENNIALS.
• Of those 17-letter words, all except the following can be spelled using the 1992 dice: ACQUISITIVENESSES, DISQUALIFICATIONS, INQUISITIVENESSES, and PICTURESQUENESSES.
• There are 8 24-letter words that can be spelled using the Big Boggle (1979) dice, they are: DICHLORODIFLUOROMETHANES, ELECTROCARDIOGRAPHICALLY, ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHERS, ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIES, INTERCOMPREHENSIBILITIES, MICROSPECTROPHOTOMETRIES, OVERINTELLECTUALIZATIONS, PHOSPHATIDYLETHANOLAMINE.
• The 25-letter word PHOSPHATIDYLETHANOLAMINES can be spelled using the Boggle Master dice.
• The longest words that can be spelled using Super Big Boggle are the 28-letter ETHYLENEDIAMINETETRAACETATES and the 27-letter words ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHICALLY and ETHYLENEDIAMINETETRAACETATE.

Notice the significant difference between the number of words that cannot be spelled between the Boggle Old and New versions with the TWL06 and SOWPODS dictionaries: There are about 10 times as many words that cannot be spelled using the newer configuration.  We have already seen that the newer configuration results in a minor increase in the average board score but while the original configuration managed to kept the unspell-able words quite low, the newer configuration makes it impossible to spell a significant number of words.  Why might this be?

Perhaps the goal was actually to prevent certain words from being spelled. For example, in the newer configuration, both of the “F”s and the only “K” now reside on one die making it impossible to spell a certain 4-letter word (which appears on about 1 out of every 1000 Boggle Old boards). In fact, 3 of the “Seven Dirty Words” cannot be spelled on in the newer configuration, along with numerous variations, whereas they could all be spelled in the original configuration. The remaining 4 "Dirty Words" could not be eliminated without seriously affecting the ability to spell a substantial number of common words, significantly hampering game play. Could it be that the increase in unspell-able words is the fallout of an attempt at censorship?  It seems plausible, especially considering that Boggle was marketed as a family game.

Generating High Scoring Boards

The last item on the agenda is generating boards that have artificially high (or low) point values in an attempt to answer the question “What is the best Boggle board?”.  Such a capability is also useful for game balance purposes.  For example, the Scramble with Friends game uses a set of 16 dice to generate their boards but the boards generated consistently have a much higher scoring potential than the expected average of simple random board generation.  It is obvious that some mechanism for "enhancing" the randomly generated boards is employed to optimize the experience for the player.

There are several approaches to generating such enhanced boards, most starting with a randomly generated board followed by various operations performed in an attempt to improve the board score. The operations that can be performed on an existing board include changing the value of a particular die and swapping the positions of two die. Each such change can result in either an overall increase, a decrease, or no change in the board score. The success of such an approach depends on the algorithm used to determine when to move forward with a modified board vs. when to fall back to a previous board and try again, and what type of manipulations to perform.

The simplest approach would be to randomly change a letter or swap dice, replacing the current board with the new board whenever the score of the new board exceeds, or possibly matches, the existing board. This is a good start and will certainly find much higher scoring boards on average than randomly rolled boards. The problem is that a significant number of high scoring boards come from making a set of changes that include manipulations that temporarily reduce the board score, a small reduction in score from one manipulation may open the door to future manipulations that significantly increases the overall board score. Such cases would never be discovered by an algorithm that insists on a constantly increasing board score and such cases turn out to be significant in practice.

To address the local minima problem, the algorithm should allow changes that reduce the overall board score in certain situations, the details of when to allow this are the core of such an approach. The technique employed by WGS is simulated annealing where a decrease in board score has the potential to be allowed based on the impact of the board score (energy) and the stability of the board (temperature). This allows disruptive changes during initial board modifications but allows the board to stabilize by only allowing successively smaller degradations throughout the process. The current implementation is tweaked based on some testing but is not particularly sophisticated and certainly has room for further improvements. For example, the decision regarding which die to manipulate is random, it may be more fruitful to consider information such as how many words each die contributes to and changing one that participates in fewer words. The program has access to this information but doesn't currently use it.

Another approach that has been used is the application of genetic algorithms to create child boards that contain a combination of two high-scoring parent boards in an attempt to create a board better than either parent, repeating this process until the best board from that lineage is found. A successful application of this approach may certainly be possible but the available literature of such attempts didn't prove particularly compelling, nor did it seem to produce superior results so I didn't explore it in great detail.

The WGS program provides optional parameters to the create command allowing the user to specify word and/or score limits on the generated board. The program will try to satisfy both limits when generating the boards, employing the techniques described above to do so, ultimately delivering the best effort if the requirements couldn't be met in a reasonable number of manipulations.

100,000 requests for optimized boards (using both Boggle versions) yielded the following best boards which are all valid for both Boggle die configurations. The majority of these were discovered in the first 10,000 iterations.  The command used to generate the boards was:

wgs wgs.json create “Boggle (Old)” 100000 9999 9999

Highest Scoring Boggle Boards

SEGSRNTREIAESLPS 1435 4644

BESHLATEPIRSSENG 1418 4624

SPLBEIAENRTSGSET 1373 4623

SLPSEIAERNTRDESA 1452 4603

SRESGTAPENILDRES 1424 4532

Most Word Dense Boards

SETSPIRDLANESETS 1482 4497

SDESTRNTEIAESLPS 1474 4390

SPLSEAIERTNROSED 1468 4507

SPLSEAIERNTRDESA 1463 4431

SRESOTAPENILSDES 1458 4192

A number of transformations of the above boards were also found but are not listed (they have the same word list and point values). These boards, along with most of the optimized boards, far exceed the very best boards found in the one billion random sample, a good sign that we are in the territory of the best possible boards. But are these the best boards?  That's hard to answer but we can compare with the results of others who have tackled this problem:

http://www.gtoal.com/scrabble/chuong_do/boggle.html

A simulated annealing approach yielded SERSPATGLINESERS which is a transformation of the best board we found with 4644 points.

http://www.danvk.org/wp/2009-08-04/solving-boggle-by-taking-option-three/#more-503
Another simulated annealing approach that yielded PERSLATGSINETERS as the best board.  This board clocks in at 4512 points using SOWPODS.

While this doesn't prove we have found the best possible board, it does suggest that we are at least in the ballpark and that if there is a better board, simulated annealing may not be the best way to find it.

Summary of Results

• There are two die configurations, one used prior to 1992 and once used since. The new configuration results in about a 10% increase in the number of words and the score of an average boggle board but reduces to total number of words that can be spelled, including a number of profane words.
  
• The average pre-1992 Boggle board contains 123 words and 172 points, the average post-1992 Boggle board contains 134 words and 194 points.
• There are about 3.69e21 distinct Boggle boards.
  
• The chances of rolling a Boggle board with no words is about 1 in 7400.
  
• About half of randomly rolled Boggle boards contain an 8-letter word. The chance of a 10-letter word showing up less than 1 in 100, the chance of a 12-letter word is less than 1 in 10,000.
  
• 3-letter and 4-letter words, together, comprise about 70% of the words on an average boggle board and about 50% of the points. There are an average of about 25 5-letter words on a Boggle board which account for about 25% of the points.
  
• The best known Boggle Board (using the SOWPODS dictionary) is SEGSRNTREIAESLPS and contains 1435 words and 4644 points. The most word-dense board found is SETSPIRDLANESETSwhich contains 1482 words and 4497 points.