Boggle

A web implementation of the word game Boggle, with single-player and multiplayer modes. Built on ASP.NET Core with a dependency-free game engine covered by unit tests.

_{Two browsers, one game — chaining letters, guesses accumulating, and the leaderboard resolving at the end of the round.}

▶ Play it live

_{Hosted on Azure App Service's free tier, so the first request after a quiet spell takes up to a minute to wake the app. It's quick once it's warm.}

Features

• Single player — 4×4 board, 180-second round, find as many words as you can.
• Multiplayer — several players join one game by ID and race on the same board.
• Duplicate cancellation — if more than one player finds a word, it scores for nobody.
• Real dictionary validation — every guess is checked against a 194,433-word list.
• Server-side adjacency validation — the client submits board coordinates, not words, and the server verifies the path traces a legal chain of touching dice.
• Game log — completed rounds record what each player found.

Tech stack

Layer	Choice
Runtime	.NET 8 (LTS)
Web	ASP.NET Core MVC, Razor views
Frontend	Vanilla JavaScript + jQuery
Tests	MSTest — 31 tests
Persistence	None — games are held in memory
External services	None

The web project has no NuGet dependencies and no database, so it runs anywhere a .NET 8 runtime does.

Running it

With the .NET SDK

dotnet run --project Boggle/Boggle.csproj --urls http://localhost:5080

Then open http://localhost:5080.

With Docker

docker build -t boggle .

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 boggle

Then open http://localhost:8080. The container honours a PORT environment variable, which is what most free hosts inject.

Tests

dotnet test UnitTests/UnitTests.csproj

Architecture

Browser ──HTTP/JSON──▶ ServerController ──▶ Server (singleton)
                              │                  │
                              │                  └──▶ Game ──▶ Board ──▶ Die
                              │
                              ├──▶ WordValidationEngine   (adjacency rules)
                              └──▶ WordDictionary         (194k word list)

The client sends board coordinates, not words. WordValidationEngine reconstructs the word from the dice at those coordinates and confirms the path is legal, so a player cannot submit a word that is not actually on their board.

Scoring is deferred until the round ends, because duplicate cancellation cannot be resolved until every player has finished.

Layout

Path	Contents
Boggle/Models/	Game engine — Game, Board, Die, User, Server, WordDictionary
Boggle/Controllers/	ServerController (JSON API), HomeController, WordValidationEngine
Boggle/wwwroot/democlient.html	The game client — served at /
Boggle/wwwroot/js/	boggle.js (screens and input), apis.js (server calls), utils.js (board rendering)
Boggle/Views/	Razor views for the supporting pages
UnitTests/	MSTest suite covering the engine and controllers

HTTP API

All endpoints live under /Server and return JSON shaped as { ok: true, ... } or { ok: false, msg: "..." }.

Endpoint	Purpose
GET /Server/newGame	Create a game, returns a gameId
GET /Server/login?gameId&username	Join a game
GET /Server/startGame?gameId	Begin the round
GET /Server/getGameState?gameId&username	Board, players, scores, time remaining
GET /Server/guess?gameId&username&strcoords	Submit a word as board coordinates
GET /Server/endGame?gameId	End the round early
GET /Server/resetGame?gameId	Reset for another round
GET /Server/removePlayer?gameId&username	Remove a player
GET /Server/getGameLog?gameId	Results of completed rounds

Example:

curl "http://localhost:5080/Server/newGame"

Rules

• Find words on a grid of random letters.
• Letters must touch vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, forming a chain.
• Chains may run up, down, forward, backward, and diagonally.
• You may not skip or jump over letters.
• Words must be at least three letters long.
• Each die may be used only once per word.
• Only words in the English dictionary count.
• If another player guessed the same word, everyone who guessed it scores zero.

Full rules: https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/boggle.pdf

Scoring

Word length	Points
3–4	1
5	2
6	3
7	5
8+	11

Scores stay hidden as ? until the round ends, because duplicate cancellation cannot be resolved until every player has finished: