Anagram

Anagram

Anagram is a private, single-player game in which the objective is to find as many valid words as possible using the letters of a randomly chosen base word, within a time limit.

Starting a Game

A game is created with /anagram, which takes no parameters. The bot selects a base word between 7 and 9 letters long, containing no hyphens or apostrophes, and computes every dictionary word that can be formed from its letters. If that base word turns up fewer than 5 possible answers, the command fails outright with an error message asking the player to run /anagram again — it does not automatically retry with a different word on the player's behalf. Once a suitable base word is found, the bot creates a private thread, adds the player to it, posts the base word along with a difficulty label based on its length, and starts a 1-hour timer: "You have 1 hour to find as many words as possible."

Rules

A valid guess must:

1. Be at least 2 letters long
2. Contain no hyphens or apostrophes
3. Use only letters that appear in the base word, no more times than they appear there
4. Be a word in the dictionary

The base word itself does not count as a guess and receives no reaction if submitted. Each other guess receives a reaction:

• ✅ a new, valid word
• 🟦 a word already found (duplicate; does not count again)
• ❌ invalid (not a real word, not possible from the base word's letters, or contains punctuation)

Difficulty

The base word's difficulty label is set by its length:

Length	Label
7 letters	🟢 Easy
8 letters	🟡 Medium
9 letters	🔴 Hard

Progress

The game's summary message updates after every correct word, refreshing as a new message every 21 words found (or immediately upon finding every possible word), so it does not scroll out of view in a busy thread.

Ending a Game

The game ends automatically after 1 hour. At that point, the bot reports the number of words found out of the total possible, using "🎉 Congratulations!" if completion reached at least 80%, and "⏰ Time's Up!" otherwise. If any words were missed, a text file listing them (up to 5,000) is attached; 100% completion instead gets "You found every possible word! 🏆" If the game's private thread can no longer be reached when time runs out (for example, if it was deleted), the result is posted to a fallback channel instead so it isn't lost silently.

An in-progress game survives a bot restart: its found words, remaining timer, and thread are restored automatically, and the thread receives a "🔄 Resuming your anagram game!" notice confirming the player's progress was kept.

Statistics

Tracked per player: games played, total words found, total words missed, best single-game word count, best completion percentage, average completion percentage, and average words per game. The bot separately tracks whether a player has ever reached 100% completion or at least 51% completion in a game. These stats can be viewed with /anagram_stats (Public or Private) and compared with /anagram_leaderboard (also Public or Private), which can be sorted by any of: Games Played, Total Words Found, Best Game (Words), Best Completion %, Average Completion %, or Average Words per Game.

History

The base word length was originally 11–20 letters, which produced anagram pools of roughly 1,000 to 7,000+ target words per game — far more than a player could realistically find within the hour, making 100% completion (and the associated Perfect Solver and Near-Perfect achievements) statistically unreachable. The range was narrowed to its current 7–9 letters specifically so that full and near-full completion would be achievable within the time limit.

Note: As of this writing, the achievement system's in-game description for Perfect Solver still reads "Win an Anagram game with a perfect score. (currently unobtainable)," even though the base-word narrowing above already makes a perfect score achievable — this description text has not yet been updated to match.

Note: the narrower range makes 51% (Near-Perfect) and 100% (Perfect Solver) completion realistic in theory, but as of this writing neither has actually been confirmed achieved by a player under the current 1-hour limit, so it remains unproven in practice. Further changes to make both more reliably attainable are likely, most plausibly by extending the time limit from 1 hour to somewhere around 2–3 hours; this has not been implemented yet, and any specific figure should be treated as tentative until it ships.

The scale of the change is easiest to see by putting the old and new ranges side by side. In both tables, "theoretical maximum arrangements" counts every possible arrangement of a base word's letters from length 2 up to its full length, assuming no repeated letters (the case that produces the largest possible count); "reachable at 1 word/second" is how much of that theoretical space a player could type out across the full hour, ignoring Discord's rate limits entirely. Both are upper bounds, not realistic answer-pool sizes — actual dictionary-word pools are always much smaller, since most letter arrangements aren't real words at all.

Former range (11–20 letters) — retired

Base word length	Theoretical maximum arrangements	Multiple of the real dictionary (≈1.67 million words)	Reachable at 1 word/second for the full hour
11	108,505,100	≈64.9×	3.318 × 10⁻³%
12	1,302,061,332	≈778.7×	2.765 × 10⁻⁴%
13	16,926,797,472	≈10,122×	2.127 × 10⁻⁵%
14	236,975,164,790	≈1.417 × 10⁵×	1.519 × 10⁻⁶%
15	3,554,627,472,060	≈2.126 × 10⁶×	1.013 × 10⁻⁷%
16	56,874,039,553,200	≈3.401 × 10⁷×	6.330 × 10⁻⁹%
17	966,858,672,404,672	≈5.781 × 10⁸×	3.723 × 10⁻¹⁰%
18	17,403,456,103,284,402	≈1.041 × 10¹⁰×	2.069 × 10⁻¹¹%
19	330,665,665,962,403,980	≈1.977 × 10¹¹×	1.089 × 10⁻¹²%
20	6,613,313,319,248,079,980	≈3.955 × 10¹²×	5.444 × 10⁻¹⁴%

Across this entire retired range, the theoretical space exceeded the bot's whole dictionary by roughly one to thirteen orders of magnitude, and the share of it a player could even type in an hour never rose above roughly 3 in 100,000 — at the low end (11 letters) — collapsing to about 1 in 20 quadrillion by the high end (20 letters). Full completion was not merely unlikely under these odds; it was effectively impossible.

Current range (7–9 letters) — in use

Base word length	Theoretical maximum arrangements	Fraction of the real dictionary (≈1.67 million words)	Reachable at 1 word/second for the full hour
7	13,692	≈0.8%	≈26.3%
8	109,592	≈6.6%	≈3.3%
9	986,400	≈59.0%	≈0.4%

The relationship inverts completely: instead of the theoretical space dwarfing the dictionary, it now stays under the dictionary's size at every length in range, and instead of an astronomically small sliver being typeable within the hour, a meaningful fraction of it is. In practice, real answer pools are smaller still than even this narrowed theoretical ceiling, since only actual dictionary words count — which is exactly what makes 100% completion realistic for a determined player under the current range, and was never realistic under the old one.

See also

• Super-Shiritori
• Achievements
• Dictionary Information