Word lists and guides, built from the real dictionary
Today we added two new sections to the site: word lists and guides. Ten lists, eight guides, and a glossary, every one of them generated from or checked against the dictionary and dice the game actually uses.
Why we built them
Two reasons. The first is that people kept asking. "Is HM really a word?" "Why did my seven-letter word not count?" "How often should I roll two consonants?" We had answered these one at a time in email and wanted somewhere to point.
The second is that the generic word lists you find online are wrong for WyldTyle. The game uses a 22-letter alphabet: the dice never produce J, Q, X, or Z, so a Scrabble two-letter list is padded with QI, XI, ZA, and JO, none of which you can ever play here. We wanted lists that show exactly what is playable and nothing else.
How they were made
The lists are generated by the game server at startup from the same dictionary file it validates your words against, so they cannot drift out of sync. For each word we compute its point value from the letter table. For the highest-scoring pages we sort by points and take the top sixty at each length. For the vowel-heavy and vowel-free pages we count A, E, I, O, and U in every word. Across the 47,796 playable words of two to seven letters, that produced some numbers we found genuinely surprising:
- A board of typical words needs about 14 vowels in 38 letters. The default consonant-and-vowel roll supplies nineteen. That gap is the basis of the roll selection guide, and it changed how some of us play.
- The highest possible score is 163, and it needs six Ks on one board. Nobody is getting there.
- There are 90 two-letter words, and fourteen of them score 6 or more.
We also removed a short list of slurs and profanity from the displayed lists. The words remain valid in play, since the dictionary is what it is, but there is no reason to feature them on a page.
The guides
The guides are written by hand, but the numbers in them come from the same source. The dice odds page reads the actual die faces from the game code; if we ever rebalance a die, the page updates itself. The scoring guide pulls average and maximum scores per word length from the dictionary. We wanted advice you could check.
What's next
More lists as people ask for them. If there is a pattern you keep hitting, words ending in a particular letter, words with a particular shape, tell us at support@6831plays.com and we will see if the data supports a page.