Alone. A word that has both good and bad connotations. For Matt Rix (Trainyard) and his Ludum Dare entry, it's a goal. In The Word Alone, you are given a Boggle-esque board where you are tasked to eliminate all the other letters to leave just 'A', 'L', 'O', 'N' and 'E'.
Letters are moved off the board by first typing a word using the letters available to you on the 5 x 5 grid (unlike Boggle, the letters do not have to be adjacent). With the [arrow] keys, your chosen letters then move in unison, and any unlucky letters on the edges are nudged off and out of the game, sumo wrestling style, just without all the action. All letters are subject to these actions, so it's up to you to keep an eye on your five golden letters and make sure they're the last ones standing. See if you have the word and spatial genius to accomplish this.
Lost quite a bit of challenge when I found that
1:
you can use the ALONE-letters too
2:
you can use a built word to simply run around and push everythings off the board
Really enjoyable - finished on my second go in 25 moves. Gets a lot easier when you realise you can
use the letters A,L,O,N,E to make words as well...
Is solving this in 33 moves a good score???
The idea is good.
It's pretty fun, but after a while you realise you can
always use the two following words: 'lea' and 'lean', as they are both inside 'alone'. This means you can largely manipulate the board just by flicking between those two, certainly toward the end.
Since
the letters A-L-O-N-E all appear in their own rows and columns
it's fairly easy to
use short words to move individual letters up/down or left/right until they're all on the same row or column, then use the word ALONE to sweep everything else off the board.
As someone pointed out, the easiest way to beat this game seems to be to
arrange the letters comprising "ALONE" into a column, and then shove everything else off the board using the word "ALONE."
I got it down to 10 moves that way.
I also used
NOEL (funny, given the season just passed) and LANE a lot as well towards the end.
It's good to have more variety with
words using A-L-O-N-E in case you have some letters in a tight place. I got one where all the letters but N were clustered in one corner, so more words meant I could manipulate in different ways.
8 moves. BEE-AT-CHESS
10 moves as well.
Hate, Net, Nog, Alone
I didn't realize the board changes every time. But 8 moves is the minimum.
Choose an edge and move all letters to it. First 4 letters, then 3, 2 and 1, using those of the other letters that won't push the golden letters out. Once you've aligned ALONE, it's just 4 moves in the other direction.
Great concept and pretty easy to beat when you start using the same words over and over, which I began doing once I realized that valid "Q" words (such as "quo") and other seldom-used three/four letter words are not in their dictionary. A larger board with more vowels might be more challenging, especially if the ALONE letters couldn't be used.
I cannot turn the music down.. or even mute it.. suggestions?
Hi Iceebear,
There is no mute or volume button directly in the game... Only suggestion I can make is to turn down your computer's speakers. Always a bummer for those of us who like iTunes when playing games, though.
I googled around a bit and found this Flash Mute plug-in. As I haven't tried it, I can't recommend it as good or not...but maybe it will help?
Once you realize you can use... well the info in everyone else's spoiler on here, so I won't post it again ... you should be able to solve almost every puzzle in 8 moves. The game then becomes "what's the fastest way to figure out the 8 move answer?"
Update