I've always loved the game Boggle and thought it would be fun to make a game with a similar technique for connecting letters, but where the letters "fell" as you selected them and new letters fell in from the top.

The game has pretty elegant touch mechanics on mobile and also works well with a keyboard on a computer

After building the game and getting the touch mechanics right, I've been fiddling with how to make the game-play the most fun. I had initially imagined you would get "stuck" eventually with uncommon letters accumulating over time, so I thought you'd play until you lost, but in practice, that doesn't actually happen.

That left it unclear how to make the game the most fun. So far I've tried a few things...

• A Two Minute Blitz mode: pretty fun, but it is disappointing not to be looking for the best words
• Infinite play: play as long as you want... but it gets dull

• Limited number of words: try to score the highest number of points in a set number of words

I mostly play my word limited version -- I made a "31 words" and a "15 words" version (I use a binary-style progress indicator, hence the binary-looking numbers).

I think the game still needs tweaking.

The computer does figure out the best words in each case but I haven't figured out the best way to use that to give the user feedback. Right now if you get the best word the computer tells you, and if you're close the computer gives you a complement. It feels like it would be fun to somehow give you "credit" for getting one of the best words, or maybe even I should make a "best word" mode where you're not allowed to select a word unless it's within range of the best word on the board... but of course it's mainly dispiriting to play this kind of game against a computer, which is so much better than humans at this kind of search task.