Wordament is a competitive, online, word finding
game. This study on Wordament is about the number of
words that is found to win a round. Wordament randomly
picks a board without replacement that is randomly generated
by a program. The board consists of a 4 by 4 matrix, called
tiles, that contains at least one letter of the English
alphabet. It is the players’ job to score as many
points as they can to win the round. Points determine
the place a player comes in. In order to score points
is to find words. All words must be at least 3 letters
long; there are instances that 2 or 1 tile are used to make
a word. Points are rewarded depending on the letters
used to make the word, except for speed rounds; words made
in a speed round are rewarded with 13 points regardless of
the length of the word, but still must be at least 3 letters
long. All letters in the English alphabet are assigned
to a point value. The common letters, such as “S” and
“A”, are usually worth less and the uncommon letters, such
as “Q” and “X”, are usually worth more. Essentially, the
players are finding as many words as they possibly can in
two minutes. A round occurs every two minutes and
forty-five seconds in real time. I choose to include
all types of rounds including normal, speed, high value
letter, letter in corners, longest word, theme, etc.
Those rounds only affect the value of the word. In
theme rounds, the word that is associated with the theme is
worth 5% more than the original value of the word.
Those rounds do not affect the word count, but it affects
the amount of points that is rewarded. So choosing to
study the amount of words to win would remove variables and
bias associated with them. Choosing to study the
amount of points would have the type of round, the length of
the word, and complexity are variables that would influence
the study. Now, the way I collected random samples was
by logging on to Wordament at random times of the day evenly
as possible, regarding mornings, afternoons, and evenings.
Since rounds occurred every 2 minutes and 45 seconds, 2
minute rounds and 45 seconds for stats that is split up into
22.5 seconds for words stats and leaderboards. I would
take a screenshot of the start time of the round, round
statistics of your stats for the round, and the leaderboard.
Then, later I recorded the data into an Excel spreadsheet
then into Minitab. I also took note of the start date
and time since different amount of players can be online at
once at different time of days. The study ran from
April 1st, 2018 through April 30th, 2018. With that
data, I was able to create a time series plot for the start
time and the total players. The graph is fairly normal
with outliers in it. The total amount of players and
the first place word count as no association between the
two. Also, the 1-sample mean T-test was used to test
if 80 words, my prediction, were enough to win a round of
Wordament on average. With the sample mean of 108
words found in by the winner, I was able to conclude that 80
words is not enough to win a round of Wordament on average
since the p-value is essentially 0. Although, some
rounds consisted of less than 80 words found by the winner.
One round, the winner found 148 words. Not only that
Wordament is a competitive game, but the game does in fact
test people on their vocabulary and spelling. As a
Wordament player myself, I found words that I did not know
that even existed. Well I know how to spell those
words now but I don’t know the meaning of most words that I
found. Since the game is only accessed online, only
the people who are logged on to Wordament can only play the
game. Not only that Wordament is an online game,
people all over the planet are playing the English boards of
Wordament. Those people are included in this study.