PRINCESS

As part of my 'teach myself Perl' initiative, I've been knocking together a little game I made up one long car journey by the name of 'PRINCESS'. Just like in those puzzle magazines people used to take on trains before mp3 players and knives became popular, the aim is to get from one word to another, changing one letter at a time.

The twist in PRINCESS, is that you're playing against someone else. You'll be given a starting word (say, 'beat') and each of you will also have a secret target word ('princess' and 'frogs' maybe). You can change one letter at a time each (that is, change an existing letter, add any letter, or remove any letter), but you must make a real word on your go.

You can't use a word that's already been used, and you can pass on your go.

The two player version can be pretty fun (unless you're playing against my computer player, who always wins), as can the single player (I can get from 'beat' to 'princess' in 9 moves, can you beat that?).

I'm currently working on beefing up the speed of the computer player (he currently takes a fair amount of time once we get down to long words, but I suspect this issue may be due to Levenshtein rather than myself). I'll release the code once I'm done there.

The game's pretty fun, but the coolest thing so far has been allowing the computer to pick a random start and target word from the Scrabble 'TWL' dictionary. When it does this, games are often impossible, but I find myself playing again and again just to see random words.

My favourite so far is 'microgrooves'. I have to use that in a game of Scrabble sometime. I'd even get 50 points if I put 'grooves' onto the end of 'micro' for using up my letters ^^

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An alternative version you can play in the car, by the way, is to pick a random starting move and then simply go around the group changing one thing. The loser is the first person who can't make a word.

No-one can say a word that's been said before, or a derivative of a word that's been said. So, you can't have 'shotguns' or 'shotgunned' if you've already had 'shotgun'. Feel free to argue about multiple meanings all you want for extra entertainment ('page' = piece of paper, 'paged' = received a text message, so it's not a derivative of 'page' - etc).

Ghost is also good fun, and requires nothing other than brains, ears and vocal cords.