Mumble

Mumble is a word game using virtual Musa tiles. Unlike most word games and puzzles, the tiles don't show letters, they show shapes: half letters. We use all the Musa shapes except      and the accents   : they don't occur in English. You start with a hand of sixteen tiles, so you can only spell words up to eight letters long. Longer words are worth more points.

Your job is to make a word with those tiles by placing the tiles from your hand on the board. Shapes that become half-shapes when they connect will do so automatically -   become   - and shapes that flip over on the bottom will do so automatically -    become   . You don't have to fill every column in the grid, but any empty columns must be on the right.

To move a tile, click on it to select it, and then click where you want to put it. Double-clicking (or clicking twice) will move a tile to the next open spot on the other array. Clicking an empty column on the board will swap it with the letter to the left (if you clicked the top) or right (bottom). Otherwise, clicking or double-clicking a blank spot on the board will send all the tiles back to the hand.

If you'd like to consult the dictionary directly to see how Musa spells an English word, it costs 1 point for three words. You can also get a new hand for 1 point.

Any word on our list will score you the square of its length: a 2-letter word is worth 4 points, while a 5-letter word is worth 25 points. But every low vowel counts double. There's no timer, and you're not competing directly with anyone else. But you can keep going to earn a higher and higher score.

Our word list is a subset of the Carnegie Mellon University dictionary, and thus represent a General American dialect (with both schwi and open schwa).