I updated rangram.com to try to make it a bit more skill based with luck still a part of it. The method of uncovering the letters will require more skill and the score system was updated to reflect that

Erin and I have been doing the Rangram puzzles every day (have you? :).  Sometimes I find myself being awake for hours and not going to rangram.com, I figured it needed a shakeup.

Plus, some who don't really do word games, may have been confused about what it was asking. Now it's much more clear!

The Keyboard

Now there's a keyboard made up of 12 letters, 7 of which will be in the puzzle's pangrams, however many there are. It is your mission to first uncover what the 7 letters are, and next, figure out all of the pangrams that can be made with those letters.

The Departure

I had initially had it be like so… There are a bunch of words that I had randomly selected from my dictionary that can be made from the 7 letters in the pangram, with one letter shared among all of them (the center letter). These are broken down into the lengths of those words. So you could get a hint on the “4 letter words” and it'll return the next 4 letter word hint. Or only click on the 7 letter hint columns to try to get all of the letters that way. It turns out, this is much too luck based for my liking. I mean, I enjoy a bit of luck in my games and puzzles, but it's odd.

It's odd because, in some cases, not all of the letters would be uncovered through most of the guesses, but there's one word where the final letter may be, and it's word 5 of all of the 6 letter words in the list. This is the same case for everyone, the order of these hints is not randomized, so that's good at least. But you might be someone who tries to uncover the letters by going only to the 4 letter words first, because they are “cheaper” in score. And conversely, sometimes all of the letters were revealed in 2 hints, which would lead to above average scores for that day (not that I'm tracking).

Now, given 12 letters, if you can spot a pattern and the other 5 letters don't really throw you off (if you get a Q and U, for example, but they aren't in the final solution), you can make good guesses about what the pangrams may look like. Right now it's just a random 5 letters, but I could definitely make it to add 3 consonants and 2 vowels, for example. Or never add Q as an extra letter!

The Scoring

So the scoring has been updated. Before, it was a hint cost 2 times the length of the word, unless it was 4 letters, then it cost just 1. So there's also incentive to try to just get them from 4 letter words. Now it will be based on skill and luck. So you will lose points after entering a guess, based on the number of letters that were not correct in your guess. So a good guess might only cost you 1 point. Whereas a bad guess, like the ones I make, can cost you any amount (as long as the guess).

Conclusion

I did this update in about 3 hours so if it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world. But it was fun and I think, based on the skill based aspect of it, it'll be a bit more fun to play at least. Plus it still has confetti :)

Happy coding!