Laughter and competitive energy filled the quad as the Branson English Department’s Boggle Tournament declared Director of College Counseling Matthew Lane “Ultimate Branson Boggler.”
The tournament kicked off on March 23, containing laughter and competitive energy in best-of-three matches of Boggle over several days. Competitors vied for T-shirts and Lane’s new coveted title.
“[Boggle is] a 5×5 grid of letters that you scramble up, and then once you have the grid, you have three minutes to create as many words as possible,” said Louisa Conte, a Branson English and theater fellow and the primary organizer of the Boggle tournament.
Conte compared the game to the popular New York Times game “Strands,” as both involve connecting adjacent letters to form words. She had wanted to do a word-game tournament for a long time and had discussed ideas with other members of the English department beforehand.
“We were originally going to do Scrabble-mania, but Scrabble is an hour-long game, and Boggle only takes three minutes,” said Conte. “It’s so easy, and I feel like everyone can play it.”
Though Boggle is a very entry-level, easy-to-understand game, certain skills separate a good boggler from a great one.
“I think you need a large vocabulary. I think you need to take some risks; there might be some words you think you know that may not be exactly right,” Lane said. “It’s also speed, being able to write really fast, and learning a few tricks along the way.”
Tricks such as looking for “-ing” or “s” on the board can help with maximizing the number of words you find, as well as recycling other prefixes or suffixes for the words that you find. For example, after finding the word “ETCHES,” one can look around the board for an “R” or an “F” to connect to for more words.
Conte described Lane’s Boggle skill as “scarily good.” Though you can usually win a match just by using lots of short words, Conte was especially impressed at Lane’s ability to find longer words, which Lane credits to his “voracious” reading and experience with word games.
“I love Boggle, I’ve been playing it since I was a little kid … I also do the crossword almost every day, not the Mini, though, the big boy,” Lane said. “I’ve grown up reading lots of fantasy and sci-fi, which tend to use a lot of funky words that aren’t in the common lexicon but still exist, so I recognize some words that people who don’t read those genres don’t know.”
The final round was a match between Lane, undefeated in match play leading up to the finals, and Marissa Higgins ’28. Though Lane was taken aback after Higgins “killed” him in their first game, Lane still pulled out with the win.
“Marissa’s friends tried to pie me in the face right before I was playing Marissa to get me off my game, but it didn’t work. I still beat her,” Lane said.
Ultimately, Conte and Lane both enjoyed the mix of casual and competitive vibes throughout the whole tournament.
“I think we should start a Boggle club. I think that would be fun. I love a word game, so I think we should keep it going because in the end, our goal is to make English cool,” Conte said.
