How to play
Wait for the game to start. Then study the letters on the grid, and make terms by stringing together at least 3 letters that touch each other, side-by-side, up-and-down, or diagonally.
Terms are taken from declarative mark-up languages curated by W3C (CSS, HTML, SVG, XML, XSLT) and IETF (HTTP). You can find our vocabulary here: Zjramble5 Web Mark-Up Vocabulary.
On a touch screen, you can swipe across the letters.
Otherwise click them or type them. Then have the word score calculated by hitting enter or double tapping the last letter button.
If the word you entered is part of this round's vocabulary, and you haven't found it yet during this round, its score will be added to both your game score and the available play time.
If you enter a letter that does not touch the previous letter, the game assumes you meant to start a new word. It will erase the previous input.
Each round, the game takes about 30 seconds to randomly select which words to find, and to compute the optimal choice of grid letters.
Play time relates to the amount and length of words you can find in each round.
As a hint, we present a list of terms to find. It shows how many terms of differing amounts of letters you can find during this round.
When the game runs out, all the terms you could have found are shown. Selecting any of those will mark it on the grid.
Hints
Rotate the grid to discover more words. To rotate the grid, type a space into to word input, or touch the "↰" (rotate) button.
Every 10 seconds, you may request a hint. There is a penalty: the word bonus is cancelled.
Select a word from those you found, to mark its letters on the grid.
After the game is over, the list with groups of words to find will show the actual words you could have found that round. Selecting any word will mark its letters on the grid.
iPad user? Add this stand-alone version of Zjramble5 Mark-Up to your home screen for off-line game-play!
Zjramble5 Music is available at the Firefox Marketplace.
And as for the why…
Zynga used to publish a wonderfully popular game called Scramble. You could find it for instance on Facebook.
Unfortunately, Zynga had Scramble coded in Adobe Flash. That choice rendered the game completely unusable on Apple's iPhone, iPad, and other Flash-free devices. Zynga then published an iPhone app for Scramble, that can be used on an iPad too.
As an alternative, ΩJr. set out to create a version of Scramble, based on pure HTML, some CSS, and quite a bit of Javascript. This version we call Zjramble5.
ΩJr. intends to have Zjramble5 run cross-platform, cross-browser, in any web browser that supports HTML5, CSS3,and Javascript. (This may rule out Opera Mini, Skyfire, and similar browsers).
