1 minute, 15 seconds

I was taking a flight and wanted to play Boggle while onboard. I looked for a simple “show me a Boggle board” app for my phone, and only found ones of dubious quality, ad laden ones or ones that were something like “play a boggle-like game with friends (account required, has ads, is not boggle)”.

Eventually I gave up when I found this great website that generates .png images of Boggle boards. Even better, I could do a bunch of curl calls (with a 5 second sleep in-between, to be nice) to download a BUNCH of boards. Then I could use ImageMagick’s montage to stitch them all together in a 2×4 layout, which printed out nicely. montage -tile 2x4 -mode concatenate *.png output.png to be exact ;) With 4 or 5 pages printed out, I cut out each board, stapled together and made for the perfect Offline Boggle Booklet. Worked great!

However, on the flight I was thinking that it’d be pretty easy to write a bit of JavaScript and bang out a board that worked well offline. Further, I realized that CSS supports transformations, like transform: rotate(90deg)that could even mimic the rotated dice like the site above I referenced. Indeed, by the end of the flight I had all the hard parts worked out. This was mostly me working offline without Stack Exchange to remember this or that. Special thanks to xuth.net for post the source to the perl app which gave me some good ideas on how to write this!

After landing, and doing some refining, I’m happy to present Offline Boggle Boards. Load up the web page before you take off and you’re good to go! Also, for you coder types, pull requests welcome!