Boggle is a word game, invented by Allan Turoff and distributed by Parker Brothers, in which players make words from a random 4x4 grid of letters. The grid is formed by shaking 16 dice, with letters on their faces, in a plastic box. The dice fall into 16 square indentations in the base of the box. Then the lid is removed and the players have 3 minutes to write down as many words as they can find. When time runs out, the players compare their words lists, crossing out any words found by 2 or more players. Each player's score is based on the lengths of the words that he or she alone found.
Words are formed by moving between letters in the grid which are adjacent horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. For example, in the grid below, the red path gives the word DECIDE. A word's path may cross itself, like the blue path that forms BENCH. But it can't use any square more than once; for example, we can't form DECIDED by extending the red path back to its first letter.
In addition to the boxed game, there are several online versions, including Puzzle Baron's WordTwist (where I spend way too much time). In 1994 there was a short-lived TV game show, Boggle: The Interactive Game.
The official rules allow words of 3 or more letters. But when my friends and I play, we exclude 3-letter words, to avoid wasting time writing down words that will probably be found by other players anyway.
During a recent game, we found several words related to geocaching:
BISON CACHE DECON EARTH ICON MICRO NORTH TEAM TRADE TRAIL
(It turns out that DECON isn't in the dictionary we were using, but two players wrote it down, so it didn't matter.)
Of course, we also found quite a few words that aren't cache related, including:
CHEDDAR CLICHE NOTCHED SLICE
To find the coordinates of the cache, you'll need to figure out what 4x4 grid these words came from. Of course, rotating or reflecting the whole grid doesn't change the words in it, so there are 8 possible answers. They all give the same coordinates.
The coordinates are
N 40 49._ _ _ W 124 11._ _ _
where the missing digits are obtained from the grid as follows: First, list the 4 letters in the corners, in alphabetical order. Throw out the first one and translate the others to digits using this code:
A B C D E H I L M N O R S T
2 8 0 7 5 6 7 1 8 9 4 6 3 2
Use those 3 digits in the latitude.
Then do the same thing with the 4 letters in the center of the grid, to obtain the missing digits of the longitude.
For example, for the grid shown earlier, the corner letters are KMNO. Throw out the K and translate MNO to 894. The central letters are BCDE. Throw out the B and translate CDE to 075. So if that grid were the solution, the coords would be N 40 49.894 W 124 11.075.
If you think you've figured out the coordinates, you can check them with certitude:
You can also see who else has solved the puzzle. Note: You can remain anonymous if you want to; incorrect guesses are always anonymous. (Puzzle makers, you can create your own certitude links here.)
The cache is a small Snapware container.
Congratulations to the first certified solver and first finder, humboldtkc. He solved it in just 23 minutes, which is faster than I can do it!
After creating this puzzle, I wondered if there were other Boggle-related caches. As I expected, there are some that involve finding words in a given grid. But I was a bit surprised to run across Games on our Shelf: Boggle, which has 4 puzzles that require finding a grid that contains given words. And it turns out that there's a whole book full of similar puzzles (which I haven't seen yet): Sit & Solve BOGGLE Logic Puzzles, by Mark Zegarelli.