[dfan]

"More broadly, I think Valett can provide the foundation for answering other interesting questions in word games, such as how to quantify the difficulty of Boggle boards."

Well, you can already quantify the difficulty of Boggle boards pretty well just by counting up all the points you can make on them (it's a small enough problem that you can do that pretty fast). I think the topology of the board is important enough (whether those I N and G blocks are next to each other or not makes a _big_ difference) that a simple histogram of letters isn't going to be sufficient.

[jlewis_st]

I was thinking that you could sum up the transition probabilities from the actual transitions available on the board as the main measure. Then you could use frequency by length to weight legal Boggle plays (3/4 letters and up, so 2-letter words wouldn't even count).

You're right that with a Boggle board you could just count up the available Boggle points by finding all the possible words, but that might miss some aspects of how hard the words are for a human to find.

[robryan]

If you had enough real games data you could see how often a word is found when present and use that is a weighing factor. Although the arrangement if a word might also impact the likelihood to be found.

[Tloewald]

Changing the values of tiles will change the game, so you'll have a new mismatch. I think that a simpler fix would be to ban plays of fewer than three or four tiles are placed (I'd say four since three is still too easy). You can still score off the stupid two letter gotchas, but you have to place a three or four letter word down to score anything.

The game would end when all players had two few tiles to play.

[robryan]

I am speaking of Boggle, where the scoring is based on unique words.