Boggle Solver

Solve Boggle boards — find all valid words (German + English) on a 4x4 letter grid. Use when the user shares a Boggle photo, asks for words on a grid, or plays word games. Includes 1.7M word dictionaries (DE+EN).

Fast trie-based DFS solver with dictionary-only matching. No AI/LLM guessing — words are validated exclusively against bundled dictionaries (359K English + 1.35M German).

Workflow (from photo)

1. Read the 4x4 grid from the photo (left-to-right, top-to-bottom)
2. Show the grid to the user and ask for confirmation before solving
3. Only after user confirms → run the solver
4. Always run English and German SEPARATELY — present as two labeled sections (🇬🇧 / 🇩🇪)

Solve a board

# English
python3 skills/boggle/scripts/solve.py ELMU ZBTS ETVO CKNA --lang en

# German
python3 skills/boggle/scripts/solve.py ELMU ZBTS ETVO CKNA --lang de

Each row is one argument (4 letters). Or use --letters:

python3 skills/boggle/scripts/solve.py --letters ELMUZBTSETVOCKNA --lang en

Options

Flag	Description
--lang en/de	Language (default: en; always run EN and DE separately)
--min N	Minimum word length (default: 3)
--json	JSON output with scores
--dict FILE	Custom dictionary (repeatable)

Scoring (standard Boggle)

• 3-4 letters: 1 pt
• 5 letters: 2 pts
• 6 letters: 3 pts
• 7 letters: 5 pts
• 8+ letters: 11 pts

How it works

• Builds a trie from dictionary files (one-time, ~11s)
• DFS traversal from every cell, pruned by trie prefixes
• Adjacency: 8 neighbors (horizontal, vertical, diagonal)
• Each cell used at most once per word
• Qu tile support: Standard Boggle "Qu" tiles are handled as a single cell (e.g., QUENHARI... → "QU" occupies one position)
• All matching is dictionary-only — no generative/guessed words

Data

Dictionaries are auto-downloaded from GitHub on first run if missing.

• data/words_english_boggle.txt — 359K English words
• data/words_german_boggle.txt — 1.35M German words

Performance

• Trie build: ~11s (first run, 1.7M words)
• Solve: <5ms per board