Keebble

Keebble answers the question: what if Scrabble could be played in 30 minutes and with just a piece of paper?

It’s one of my One Paper Games. You place words by writing them on the paper. What makes the game work, though, are some smart rules about how you get new letters and some additions I’ve always wanted in Scrabble.

What’s special?

Interactive rules. I had designed my rulebooks for print (in PDF format) for years. But I’d always felt like we needed interactive rules to explain games—and websites were the ideal candidate.

So I bit the bullet and decided to develop a system for interactive rules. This game was the first to use it. The idea is simply that the reader can engage with the rules:

• Open/close sections. (To prevent being overwhelmed by walls of text.)
• Cycle through examples images.
• Read on any screen size / setting
• Click a button to randomly generate an “example turn”.

Pandaqi Words. At this time, I had several ideas for “word games”. That’s why I started building my own dictionary of “easy/useful English words”. You can use this dictionary, on my website, to settle any debate that starts with: “that’s not a word!”

Also, the website generates random starting boards. In case you don’t like starting from an entirely blank paper.