Boggle Boards

In case anyone wants to know, here are the specs for Boggle – both for Original Boggle and for Big Boggle – in a handy machine-readable format. The format is line oriented with each line representing a single die, and the sides of the dice delimited by spaces. Note that there is a side with 'Qu' on it, so you must allow for a multi-letter side in your parser.

A A C I O T
A B I L T Y
A B J M O Qu
A C D E M P
A C E L R S
A D E N V Z
A H M O R S
B F I O R X
D E N O S W
D K N O T U
E E F H I Y
E G I N T V
E G K L U Y
E H I N P S
E L P S T U
G I L R U W

A A A F R S
A A E E E E
A A F I R S
A D E N N N
A E E E E M
A E E G M U
A E G M N N
A F I R S Y
B J K Qu X Z
C C E N S T
C E I I L T
C E I L P T
C E I P S T
D D H N O T
D H H L O R
D H L N O R
D H L N O R
E I I I T T
E M O T T T
E N S S S U
F I P R S Y
G O R R V W
I P R R R Y
N O O T U W
O O O T T U

Usage

Here is a simple CFML function which accepts a board definition and returns an array representing a "roll" of the grid:

<cffunction name="roll" output="false" returntype="array">

   <cfargument name="board" type="string" required="true" />
   <cfset var result = [] />
   <cfloop list="#board#" index="die" delimiters="#chr(10)#">

      <cfset die = listToArray(die, ' ') />
      <cfset arrayAppend(result, die[randRange(1, arrayLen(die))]) />
   </cfloop>
   <cfset createObject('java', 'java.util.Collections').shuffle(result) />
   <cfreturn result />
</cffunction>

And the result of executing it on the original board:

[N, T, W, A, B, Qu, B, D, L, M, D, H, D, L, G, V]

Here's a Groovy Closure which does the same thing:

{
   it = it.tokenize('\n')
      .collect{ it.tokenize(' ') }
      .collect{ it[new Random().nextInt(it.size)] }
   Collections.shuffle(it) // icky!
   it
}

And the result of executing it on the big board:

[N, E, G, N, N, C, S, A, F, E, U, N, H, I, P, H, C, T, T, O, I, O, Qu, T, T]

NB: The source for this post can be found at http://www.barneyb.com/boggle/.  Any updates I may have will go there.