We LOVE the passion of Wordament players! It’s why we read and try and answer every single piece of email we get. We appreciate the fact that people take time out of their lives to chat with us about a free word game. For this blog post, this particular piece of player mail seemed really appropriate:

Guys, plz… Dutch, Swedish,Spnaish???? This is rediciolous!

Why not german? German is the offical language in:
Germany
Austria
Switzerland
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
and Belgium!

Recognised minority language in
Czech Republic
Denmark
Hungary
Kazakhstan
Italy
Namibia (National language; official language 1984–90)
Poland (Auxiliary language in 28 municipalities in Opole Voivodeship and 1 in Silesian Voivodeship)
Romania
Russia
Slovakia (Official municipal language of Krahule/Blaufuß)
Vatican City (Administrative and commanding language of the Swiss Guard)

… Means maby over 150 mio people talkin in German and you bring is Dutch???? Whats wrong with you?!
So pleaaase do somthing for the German talking people :/

And our response:

Thanks for your comments. German Edition is next. We understand EXACTLY how important German is, so we didn’t rush garbage out the door in haste. We’ve been busily working and testing it to bring online as a Beta NEXT WEEK. We will likely still have gaps in our lexicon, but we are working hard to have this language be solid as we agree with you: It’s really important.

So, tonight (or this morning if you are in Germany), we proudly unveil our BETA of Wordament German Edition. We are pretty proud of all of our Language Editions, but this one had some extra care and help from a native speaker and a close friend of Wordament: EchoFoxtrotDJ (formerly DidjaRedo). Echo and his whole family and have been big community supporters of our game for as long as we can remember and they have contributed more themed word lists to English Edition than anyone except oOo Scruff oOo who helps out the team every night.

Like all of our other Language Editions, German is BETA. We think it’s a high quality BETA, but we know there will be words that are legal that are missing, and words that are illegal that are included. In particular, we had to allow some proper nouns in (by accident) to make sure we had the correct coverage of everyday words.

So, please enjoy and help us tune and improve this version. As with all of our other Language Editions, here’s how you can help us:

1) Please be specific! Know that we are here to get this right and that we acknowledge that it’s not perfect, right now… so, when you do contact us, please be specific! What words aren’t words? Which words are we missing? In many cases our lexicon already has everything—but valid words have been removed or abbreviations have been left. We start from a really rich Microsoft German Lexicon, but are slicing and dicing it to convert it from a “spell check” lexicon to a “word game lexicon”—they are very different things. In particular, please help us with last names that aren’t words. We know we have some of these, but they are hard to find and remove.

2) Please be patient with us! We are rolling new puzzles out for each language each day right now as we learn and refine. If the puzzles are “terrible” today, then try again tomorrow. If you sent us specific feedback, we’ll have heard you and may have been able to fix it.

3) Know that all features will appear in time! Today, we are launching with “Normal” puzzles, which feature Digrams or a Trigram in every puzzle.We do not have German “themed puzzles” yet—but they will be coming!

Thanks in advance for the help you can provide us to improving this Language Edition. To play in German Edition, pivot to Hilfe & Optionen and select Deutsch BETA in the Rätsel-Sprache picker. 

As Bing Translate says “Viel Glück und genießen!” (Good luck and enjoy!)

Tonight marks 3 weeks of availability of Wordament on Xbox LIVE on Windows Phone. In the transition to Xbox LIVE, we started a new one-year tournament and we are nothing short of amazed at some of the great players and results we are seeing. We used to commemorate these moments with a clip art trophy and call that person a Champ. These days, accomplishing these tasks actually unlocks that Achievement!

Top players

Just a couple of days ago, our first player racked up 1,000,000 points and 1,000,000 words found. In the couple of days since: 10 people have done this:

• Preppy
• BoomRShine
• Nandigam
• Slizos
• deirdrethedub
• HeDish96
• st deacon
• Wicketwok69
• juliemacmartin
• hiatus105 (at time of this post, this player was at 998,562 points)

As it currently stands, to get the Champ achievement by Total Score, position #250 is at 441,000 points.

Average Scores

On the Average Score (all time) leaderboard, the top results are nothing short of incredible. The top 35 players all average 800+ points per full game they play.

“Fingers of Fury”

The final milestone to call out is number of words found in a single game. Here are our top finishers:

• Wicketewok69 – 131 words (in the Xbox LIVE version), 133 all time.
• mztan – 130 words (Xbox LIVE), 131 all time.

Boy would we love to see a video of play like that! One of the things that particularly impresses us with these classes of results is that these players almost never hit “You’re guessing!” They have memorized and can recall visual patterns that make all of these words. Remember, this is more than 1 word per second sustained! And, for all of the new players to Wordament that think these players are cheaters—let us assure you they are not! We know them personally and have seen them get results like these. But, don’t take our word for it:

There are many more like this on YouTube!

Thanks for making the competition hotter than ever!

– Jason / Black Snapper

We wanted to take a minute to update you on some changes we’ve made to our newest Language Edition. Thanks to the help from lots of players that have contacted us, our trusty language developer Tim has been able to resolve an issue that was blocking about 70,000 words from being accepted in our game. We also found that the tile values and total puzzle scores weren’t right. We updated those too recently, and now our puzzles are much closer to the same generation criteria as English Edition, including scoring range. If you haven’t played in the last day or so, give it another try!

We’ve had several hundred “missing words” reported to us. Those really help! Of those, and after we fixed the issue with word removal, our Swedish lexicon “naturally included” about 2/3rds of the reported words. We are still looking at why the remaining 1/3 of the reported words are still missing or being removed. Swedish will continue to improve in the coming days and weeks—so please keep the feedback rolling in! We are listening.

– Jason / Black Snapper

As we’ve progressed down the Language Editions path, a number of people questioned our order: Why Spanish, then Dutch, then Swedish? In part, it was because those were the languages that were most “requested.” Not the most spoken world-wide, but in the microcosm of Wordament—Swedish is a top requested language. It’s also a really hard language to do with 16 tiles. In fact, the only language that we think will be harder, is German. And that’s next.

So, with even more humility than for Dutch Edition BETA, we launch Swedish Edition BETA today. The first thing you will notice is that every board has at least one “N-gram”. In English, Spanish, and Dutch, we have a special Digram round.

For Swedish, we need at least one Digram in every board—the words are just longer. Round-over-round you will get boards with either:

• 1 – 4, non-adjacent Digrams
• 1 Trigram (like the ARN) above

We have no special rounds for Swedish Edition BETA yet. But, we believe the lexicon is ready and we believe the puzzles are good enough to try this. Here’s how you can help us when you provide feedback:

1) Please be specific! Know that we are here to get this right and that we acknowledge that it’s not perfect, right now… so, when you do contact us, please be specific! What words aren’t words? Which words are we missing? In many cases our lexicon already has everything—but valid words have been removed or abbreviations have been left. We start from a really rich Microsoft Swedish Lexicon, but are slicing and dicing it to convert it from a “spell check” lexicon to a “word game lexicon”—they are very different things.

2) Please be patient with us! We are rolling new puzzles out for each language each day right now as we learn and refine. If the puzzles are “terrible” today, then try again tomorrow. If you sent us specific feedback, we’ll have heard you and may have been able to fix it.

3) Know that all features will appear in time! Today, we are launching with “Normal” puzzles, which feature Digrams or a Trigram in every puzzle.We do not have Swedish “themed puzzles” yet.

Thanks in advance for the help you can provide us to improve this Language Edition. To play in Swedish Edition, pivot to Hjälp & alternativ and select Svenska BETA in the Pusselpråk picker. We are so proud to offer this game to Swedish speaking players!

As Bing Translate says “Lycka till!” (Good luck!)

The day has come. We’ve just enabled the World Champ achievement and awarded hundreds of achievements across all languages. Here are the specifics so you too, can unlock this achievement:

Total score (all time)

You must appear in the top 250 players in the Total score (all time) leaderboard AND earned at least 250,000 total points. If you are in the top 250, but don’t have 250,000 points, keep earning and it will unlock.

Average score (all time)

You must appear in the top 250 players in the Average score (all time) leaderboard AND have earned at least 85,000 total points, and have completed at least 100 FULL games (meaning you have the Sore Fingers achievement). We made these rules strict, to ensure that the players that appear here are Champs. We don’t want players with solvers playing 5 games, getting to the top and unlocking the achievement. If you are going to use a word solver, you are going to have to do it 100 times, at which point we will have caught you.

Congratulations to our first wave of Achievement Unlockers. Now let the battle for position 250, begin in earnest. All you need to do, is touch 250 after any single game, and it will unlock at your next sign in to Wordament.

– Black Snapper

Tonight, we humbly launch Dutch Edition BETA. With our recent Spanish Edition BETA, each member of our team had some experience with LATAM Spanish, but for Dutch, we are much less experienced. We appreciate your patience as we work to leave the BETA phase together. Each Language Edition that we launch will leave BETA when we, together, are proud of it. Spanish is SO much better this week than last week, but it’s still imperfect—it’s a BETA. We’re hoping that we’ve learned a lot of lessons from that experience and applied them to this launch, but you will be the judge of our starting quality.

Here’s how you can help us:

1) Please be specific! Know that we are here to get this right and that we acknowledge that it’s not perfect, right now… so, when you do contact us, please be specific! What words aren’t words? Which words are we missing? In many cases our lexicon already has everything—but valid words have been removed or abbreviations have been left. We start from a really rich Microsoft Dutch Lexicon, but are slicing and dicing it to convert it from a “spell check” lexicon to a “word game lexicon”—they are very different things.

2) Please be patient with us! We are rolling new puzzles out for each language each day right now as we learn and refine. If the puzzles are “terrible” today, then try again tomorrow. If you sent us specific feedback, we’ll have heard you and may have been able to fix it.

3) Know that all features will appear in time! Today, we are launching with Normal and Digram puzzles. We do not have Dutch “themed puzzles” yet. We will. But not today, or tomorrow, or even next week. They will be here though! If you want to help, start creating themed word lists!

Thanks in advance for all the help you will provide us! Now, to get in there, start Wordament and pivot to Help & Opties and select Nederlands in the Puzzeltaal dropdown.