Maranga

The goal of Maranga is simple enough: Take a bag of 100 random letters and organize them into real words until you’ve used them all. Sounds simple, right? But “simple” is not the same as “easy,” and beginners will find plenty of challenges just getting the bag emptied.

What are those challenges? First, you only get 7 tiles at a time, so your options are limited. As the game progresses, you’ll have more tiles to work with, but those early moves can be tricky, depending on which letters come out first.

I’ve said before that I’m aiming to make Creativity Hacker my only online presence, and in addition to “no social media,” I also mean, “no newsletter,” but I still want to run some sort of regular puzzle club for Maranga users. Here’s how I’m going to make that happen.

Why is word X not accepted?

Maranga’s dictionary was created by merging many different word game dictionaries, so anything acceptable in those will be acceptable here. But even so, some words and some variants are simply missing from those dictionaries.

English is a flexible language that permits us to construct new words using the rules of precedent and analogy. If the word elevate can be extended to elevation, then surely the word differentiate can be extended to differentiation by the same logic. But dictionaries are written by flawed humans who don’t always capture every constructable variation of a word they choose to include. And if that variant doesn’t appear in any dictionaries, it won’t appear in Maranga’s either. We considered adding such words to our dictionary as we discover them, but quickly realized that it would be a fool’s errand. No matter how many we add, there will always be more that we don’t catch. So instead of becoming a full time dictionary writing studio, we decided to leave that job to the experts.