Board Orientation.....

[RussDNails]

Anybody ever notice if the boards on Wordtwist are presented in the same orientation each time they appear? I.e. If I play board X today and happen upon it again tomorrow will it be in exactly the same orientation or could the same board appear rotated to a different position?

I've been here quite a while and have never been able to figure this out.

I suspect that the boards do appear in different rotatational orientation each time they get recycled?

[EmmaWingding]

Hello! I can't speak for the code that generates or recycles the boards here — only the site owner would know for sure — but a couple of thoughts:

For gameplay purposes it doesn't actually matter: rotating a square grid leaves every tile's neighbours exactly the same, so every word that was findable on the original board is still findable, with the same scores. The word list is invariant under rotation — it only feels different because our eyes start reading from the top left.

If you want to test your theory, though, try this: the next time you recognise a recycled board, note the letter in the top-left corner. If the boards are recycled with a random rotation, you'll eventually meet a familiar board with different corner letters — and the corners will cycle in a predictable order (top-left becomes top-right, and so on), which would confirm rotation rather than a new board.

One more thing worth remembering: many of the boards here are player-invented, so a board you know well may just be somebody's submitted creation coming round again. Do report back if you catch one in the act!