[00:00:00] Ceasar: If you just learn the two letter words, you're going to beat everybody you meet because nobody plays with, you know, nobody knows all of them and you can make parallel plays. And create place, parallel other place and make a whole bunch of two letter words. And then you get like 50 extra points.
[00:00:13] Joseph: So you could just drop a tile and land yourself 50 points.
[00:00:17] Ceasar: That's yeah, exactly. That happens. That happens in our games as well. Sometimes we're playing and then somebody drops QI for 62 points. Here we go. Now I'm going to lose.
[00:00:33] Welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day.
[00:00:43] Joseph: All right, Aaron. So today we're talking with Cesar and Jesse of Woogles. And I didn't, I didn't close the loop on the ketchup. So if you listen all the way through, you won't get a payoff on the condiments.
[00:00:59] One of [00:01:00] them loves ketchup. One of them does it.
[00:01:02] Aaron: We didn't close that loop, but we covered a lot of other great ground. I thought it was really interesting. You know, their approach to creating a 501 C three for the exploration of this game and frankly, like no offense to a lot of nonprofits, but a lot of nonprofits.
[00:01:20] You know, just because it is volunteer effort, like websites, maybe don't look super professional. Don't have the highest quality things like you go to their website. This looks like a company, like this looks like a legit enterprise. And I think a lot of that just comes back to Cesar and Jesse's background and, and, you know, really taking a professional approach to things and, and frankly their love of Scrabble.
[00:01:45] So it was cool to talk with them here. Kind of see how, how everything came to be. Yeah.
[00:01:51] Joseph: Super exchange around the difference between like, Hey, I've done a legit startup and we're doing what is [00:02:00] a nonprofit along the way. And I didn't anticipate it getting so far down the AI path so early in the conversation, but, uh, we touched on all kinds of stuff and we hope you enjoy the episode killer
[00:02:16] today. We're thrilled to speak with. César del Soler and Jesse Day, who helped bring Woogles to the world. Both Cesar and Jesse have shared interest in Scrabble. However, they do not share their interest in condiments. One of them is a coder. The other is a data cruncher. And together along with the community, they've built Woogles, a nonprofit for gaming with a particular love of words.
[00:02:44] Welcome guys. Thanks for being here.
[00:02:45] Jesse: Thanks for having us.
[00:02:46] Ceasar: Yeah. Thank you so much for having us.
[00:02:48] Joseph: For sure. I understand. Uh, we're spread across the country. Aaron and I are in Minneapolis. Where do we find you guys?
[00:02:55] Jesse: I'm normally in Austin, Texas. Uh, although I'm currently in Colorado with my family.
[00:02:59] Joseph: Oh, [00:03:00] wonderful.
[00:03:00] Ceasar: Cool. I'm in New Jersey myself.
[00:03:02] Joseph: Fantastic. Both great parts of the country.
[00:03:05] Ceasar: My wife is from Indiana.
[00:03:07] Joseph: Oh, uh,
[00:03:09] Ceasar: near Minneapolis.
[00:03:09] Did you say Medina or Edina? No. Edina. Yeah. Edina. I, I know a little bit about that. I might be in Edina right now. Oh, cool. . Yeah. Um, well that's wonderful. There's more to talk about there, like, where did you guys meet and No, let's not do that , so, wow.
[00:03:27] I understand that. I understand that Woogles was inspired by. Another. org and this was Lynch's, right? Let's not ask me to pronounce anything more, but tell me, tell us about that. Aha moment. I
[00:03:47] remember this very clearly. I was, uh, I think it was on something like, like Reddit or Hacker News back in like 2013, 2014.
[00:03:55] And somebody was talking about different sites for playing chess. And then [00:04:00] I clicked on the thread and somebody mentions how Leach has this beautiful site and has everything like it was made by like, like one single developer. And it does like everything that you wanted to just say, like, you have analysis and tournaments and, and it's just a nice way to play.
[00:04:14] It's all open source. So I click through now. It's just like shocked. Like, just by looking through it, like, I couldn't believe, like, that 1 person built this and I immediately fired an email to him. I'm like, this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen. And I, I'm so inspired to do something similar for like a game like Scrabble, but, you know, there's a, there's a copyright issue.
[00:04:31] So, I don't know if I would get a buy in from the founders and whatever for the, for the trademark owners. And, you know, he responded just like a nice, like, like, I thank you for emailing me. Hope, you know, hope it works out. And then that was just in my head for a few years and then. Once the pandemic hit, it was, it was Jesse, myself, and, and, uh, and a third guy named Conrad who served as a designer who got together and decided to make something kind of like in my head, like, like I took a lot of inspiration from Lee chess, but there was [00:05:00] also like a lot of our own secret sauce there as well.
[00:05:03] Yeah.
[00:05:04] The pandemic through the world, a number of curve balls, but It's a recurring theme that something was made during that time and we can shock this up to that. That's wonderful. And Jesse, how did you, was it like a Zoom cast and he threw an idea over the wall or how did you come across this, this wild notion from your friend, the developer?
[00:05:27] Jesse: Well, before the pandemic, I was mostly preoccupied with kind of the selfish pursuit of being as good of a Scrabble player as I could be. And I made it to the world championship finals twice. The first time I was two games away from winning the second time I came one game away from winning and then the pandemic happened and I realized as I wanted to compete that the only websites that were out there to play my game of choice on.
[00:05:59] Were [00:06:00] the same ones from almost 15 years earlier, where I'd started in the mid 2000s as a teenager, the UI hadn't changed, there were vulnerabilities, it was not suitable for high level competition. And so I think we probably mutually complained about this together until. We actually got enough. Uh, we were just probably tossing ideas around and it started to get an amount of seriousness because our friends got interested and that's when we decided to actually raise money and try to turn this into a reality.
[00:06:35] Joseph: Super. I, we, both Aaron and I have been there where you just kick stuff around for fun and then it gets serious,
[00:06:44] right, Aaron?
[00:06:45] Aaron: Yeah, it seems a little familiar.
[00:06:47] Joseph: I think the phrase is none of us need another K1, but it's
[00:06:53] Ceasar: fantastic. One interesting aside is that Jesse and I, like for a couple of years before, we're actually in a, in a project to [00:07:00] develop an AI to play the game of Scrabble as well as possible, right?
[00:07:04] And we, we've been like, we had, like, planning sessions over at his apartment where we, like, sketch out things. And sometimes even we actually worked at the same job for a couple of years, but that's, we'd stay after work and sketch out algorithms and stuff. And it was around when the pandemic started that we said, okay, like.
[00:07:20] We have something that's pretty good. We want to show the world. The AI is about as good as the current existing one on the market. And then we decided, well, do we actually want to do an AI or do we want to make a way for everybody to play? So we kind of decided to create Woogles and put the AI on hold for a bit.
[00:07:35] Lately, I've been, I've been working a bit more on the AI and Jesse like came up with some really good values for different parameters that are. Superior to those of Quackle, which is the existing AI for Scrabble. So I think we now have the best AI in the world, but we want to do some more experiments and play it against existing AIs.
[00:07:54] And now there's people on YouTube making like series like best of 100 series against it and getting their butts kicked. [00:08:00] So it's kind of nice.
[00:08:02] Joseph: Oh, that's fun. Best of 100 against the current model.
[00:08:06] Ceasar: Yeah, the best AI that we have, that we have right now, the current model, exactly. But we still haven't applied, like, we'd like to apply machine learning and things like that to it.
[00:08:12] Jesse's the expert on that. But even what we have right now without that is like, I think it's formidable enough. I'm
[00:08:18] Aaron: super curious about AI on this. I've got a coding background. I'm not deep in AI, but You know, as I think about AI in the gaming space, you've got kind of levels of, you know, what's been developed over time with, with different games.
[00:08:33] And if I've got the history right, you know, at, at first it was kind of, okay, we're going to build AI for chess. And, and that was, Seeing as this audacious thing for a long time, like, can we even build an AI that's gonna, gonna beat the world's best chess players, but then, like, building it for, for Go seemed like the unachievable thing, and, and now, there's, there's AI for that.
[00:08:56] What's, what's your guys assessment for, for [00:09:00] Scrabble, like, level of difficulty if you compare building AI for that to, uh, You know, building AI for, for chess or ergo or some of these other popular games.
[00:09:10] Jesse: It's extreme. There, there's no other way to put it just because of the number of permutations. When I draw tiles out of a towel bag, there are a hundred tiles, always the same tiles every game, but there's a hundred factorial different ways or orders that I can draw tiles out of, out of the towel bag.
[00:09:28] So to solve it deterministically is a massive challenge beyond any other game, but it is not frequently approached that way. A lot of people think Scrabble is solved simply because learning the words is such a challenge. That very few humans do so at the level of a computer. Yeah,
[00:09:51] Ceasar: computer can just find all the plays
[00:09:53] Jesse: immediately.
[00:09:54] Right, but there's this whole deep strategic aspect to it that is [00:10:00] really only the surface is being scratched. Our best player, Nigel Richards, who's this otherworldly. Kind of famous, even on random Reddit threads, Saban, who can read dictionaries and then play in the, in that lexicon at a world class level, uh, he does stuff that none of us understand.
[00:10:22] Ceasar: Yeah. And we've tried to replicate it. I have a video where I replicated something that he did, like based on like the move that his opponent made. And we tried to apply inferences. We would say, okay, based on the move that, that Nigel's opponent made, can our bot figure out. What the best move that Nigel should make in return, because Nigel at the time made something that we thought was, was a ridiculous move.
[00:10:43] And it turns out that we were able to replicate that move, but we cannot replicate other moves in the same vein. So kind of interesting to see what he's doing differently from all of us. But he's, yeah, it's something that, that hopefully, like with maybe the advent of like machine learning, try to replicate it more.
[00:10:58] But at the moment, like [00:11:00] Jesse said, like there's so many possibilities that we do like a probabilistic approach. Where, for any given position, you just do, like, something called a Monte Carlo sampling, like, where you, you play out different, like, random choices for your rack and for their rack and for your rack again, and then you play, like, the best move from those, like, and you use a very simple heuristic to find the best move, because you have to do so many of this, and it has to, it has to be fast.
[00:11:24] So then that heuristic is very underdeveloped. It's the same heuristic that it. That came up in the 80s in the very first AI for this I called Maven, but we don't have anything better. Now it's 30 years later, 40 years later, but we don't really have anything better. And, you know, we have an active discord channel where people are talking about ideas and trying different things are talking about trying different things.
[00:11:43] I'm excited to see what comes to that. Even if we just come up with a better evaluation heuristic, we could probably improve that Monte Carlo player significantly. But even then it's still really good. Like even with that simple heuristic, it'll, it'll beat almost any, any human player, except, except we think probably Nigel will have to match it against Nigel, if he [00:12:00] ever agrees, that would be awesome.
[00:12:01] Aaron: That's super interesting because I think just with my development background, where, where my head went first is, well, the computer's going to beat me every time it's like. My vocabulary is terrible, so like, it's going to know the full dictionary, but I think, Jesse, what you said about that whole strategic side and some of those examples from, from Nigel, that's a super interesting, so great, great work on building that.
[00:12:26] That's amazing. You know, one of, one of the things that I'm curious about, like, it, it seems like you guys are both, you know, in the startup scene and, and probably capitalists by nature and in that regard. But, I don't see many games that, like, Are intentionally backed by a 501 C3. Like there are, you know, certainly a lot of open source games out there, but when did you get that idea specifically to like, we, we should really have a sort of a foundation behind this.
[00:12:57] Jesse: Well, it was, it was out of survival [00:13:00] because. Unlike many other popular games worldwide, the game of Scrabble is copyrighted all over the world. Actually, the copyright holder in the U. S. is Hasbro, but in the rest of the world, Mattel outbid Hasbro for the rights. Sometime a decade or two back and that copyright seems like it's going to be there for, for a long time.
[00:13:26] There is an expiration on, on copyrights, but you can also reassert it potentially. So, so we had to reckon with that and we, we've dedicated a large part of our lives to Scrabble already, but we had to come up with something that was not going to be a threat to the copyright holders. And to state our intentions, which were not to basically, uh, assert their copyright and try to profit off of it, but rather just to get more people playing Scrabble and to lift the competitive [00:14:00] level of the game, uh, we figured that going the nonprofit route was the most promising thing we could do.
[00:14:08] And we have met with Mattel, at least, and we have contacts at Hasbro since then. And I think we, we had the idea that as a big corporation, they'd be extraordinarily defensive of their copyright, because that's how they get to maintain the copyright, is by regularly challenging it. But they've actually been very receptive to us because I think we have a great mission.
[00:14:32] We have kind of a scholastic focus. A lot of our players are school children from, uh, countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka. And I think, I think they, they like what we're, we're doing sort of proven that we're, we're in this for the long haul and that we have these missions that 501c3 category.
[00:14:55] That's
[00:14:55] Joseph: fascinating. We're just making games and having fun and [00:15:00] kind of goofing off. When I came across you all, I started thinking back to when I had to learn words and Friday was always spelling test day and Thursday night I would spend crying because I've never been able to spell and when the first computers came out, I was so excited because it give you a little squiggly line under it, like really big vocabulary, but spelling for whatever reason has never organized well.
[00:15:27] As we've been playing games and building up games and teachers reaching out to us talking about math, largely our math games. It's wonderful to hear you on the language side connecting a similar kind of like, hey, we're just goofing off, wait, there's an education part. And I would love to have not been, uh, tearful.
[00:15:48] You know, fourth grader right on Thursday nights, I started playing the license plate game. And I was like, Oh, Oh, this is fun. Oh, Oh, I get this. So I had like a [00:16:00] fear and death of words. Where did your love of words start?
[00:16:03] Ceasar: Um, yeah, it's, it's hard to know. Like I, like, like you have the spelling, the spelling, like being terrified of spelling and myself, like I, I actually moved to this country when I was nine.
[00:16:13] Um, I was born in Venezuela speaking about capitalist countries, right? I was born in Venezuela. I moved to this country when I was nine and back in 1993, and I had to learn English. And my, my brother had helped me like for a few months before, because he, he's a little bit older than me. He's about 10 years older than me.
[00:16:29] And he actually, um, already knew some English. And, uh, having, like, taken it in school, so he was teaching me English before, but I was still here and I was very, very much a neophyte of the language. And my school started having spelling bees. So for some reason, I was just good at spelling bees, even though I didn't know English, and I actually made it to the school finals.
[00:16:49] But I, I remember I lost on the word, uh, facial, like pertain to the face. I just could not figure out what he was saying because I, I don't, I've never seen that word in print. And then I spelled it fashion or [00:17:00] something, but I think he also mispronounced it. This is somebody told me that he mispronounced the word.
[00:17:03] I can't remember. And then, but I always like, like, for some reason, like words just kind of stuck in my head. And it wasn't until I was like 16 or so that I found Yahoo Literati online. And it was like a, like a light bulb, like turned on for me. I used to play Yahoo games, like hearts and graffiti and all those games back in the early 2000s.
[00:17:23] And literati showed up and I just got hooked on it. Like, it's just, I can't even explain it, but I just love the idea of putting words together, scoring points and finding, you know, bingos and long words. And yeah, that was like, If I got a
[00:17:36] Jesse: hot moment, I guess in my case, I had sort of a similar background to Cesar, where I actually grew up out of the country from ages five to 13.
[00:17:48] So when I was five years old, I moved to Italy. When I was eight, I moved to France and I think doing that maybe kind of helped me develop language learning, just skills. [00:18:00] And it's still something I'm really passionate about. Uh, but I think I was fortunate to have that. That experience and I think it translate when I discovered Scrabble as a 16 or 17 year old I think that was part of it was almost like learning a foreign language because Frankly when you look at the words and the definitions, there's some arcane stuff in there.
[00:18:22] It's a just a convolution of hundreds of years of language evolution obscure Scottish isms English Singlish, which is a Singapore English. There's all sorts of wild stuff, and we actually one of the obnoxious things about Scrabble is there are two perfectly reasonable lexicons. One is the U. S. One and the other is the international, which has 30, 000 more words.
[00:18:49] And I've gravitated to the latter, I think, just because it has all that, that jumble is Maori words. I find it kind of a treat. A lot of people think it's a pain in the ass, but [00:19:00] that's, that's my dream.
[00:19:02] Ceasar: Yeah, I, I tend to play mostly in the American one, but it's really like, I mean, I love the international one.
[00:19:08] I like playing in it, but I don't really get to travel that much nowadays. It's going to be a while. Good point. And, and the, the US still gravitates, like I think like 80 or 90% of our tournaments are still in the, in the US lexicon. But once in a while I'll probably out like a tournament in the, in the world lexicon.
[00:19:27] And I'm not as good at it, obviously. I don't, I don't study it very much at all. I just, I just know the three letter words and then a few bingos and a few, a few high scoring so, uh, plays besides this.
[00:19:37] Joseph: Yeah. So you've got AI deterministic models to try to figure out how to play. You've got a, like a number of different games for just learning words.
[00:19:47] There's two separate dictionaries. There's right. I just look at Scrabble and go, Ooh, I'm really glad I'm not playing that. How, how do you build, what are your tips? Like a new learner, [00:20:00] right? If you had to make a quick radio hit about how to learn Scrabble quickly to a new, fresh. person playing. What are your tips?
[00:20:11] Ceasar: Learn the two letter words. The two letter words, there's only like say about a hundred of them, like give or take. It depends on the lexicon, but you already know most of them, because they're just part of the English language, and then the weird ones like, you know, Z A means pizza, Q I means like the Chinese like a, like a G like life force, there's a few words that are super useful, but if you just learn the 2 letter words, like, you're going to, you're going to beat everybody you meet because nobody plays with, you know, nobody knows all of them.
[00:20:38] And you can make parallel place can create place parallel other place and make a whole bunch of 2 letter words. And then you get like, 50 extra points. Just by doing that.
[00:20:47] Joseph: Ah, there's always a little hack in this case, like the simple one, right? Like the one off two letter words, of course, there's
[00:20:56] Ceasar: much more to it than that, but that's one way if you, if you want to just [00:21:00] meet your, your friends.
[00:21:01] Joseph: Yeah. I, I usually see the little colored tile or it's like double word, whatever. And I'm like, huh, I don't know how to put that. So you could just drop a tile and land yourself 50 points.
[00:21:14] Ceasar: That's. Yeah, exactly. That happens. That happens in our games as well. Sometimes we're playing and then somebody drops QI for 62 points.
[00:21:22] There we go. Now I'm going to lose.
[00:21:27] Aaron: I saw Jesse's wheels turn in there. What, what tips do you got for us, Jesse?
[00:21:32] Jesse: I was thinking back to what it was like when Cesar and I were playing online and how we got into it or how we improved. Sometimes I think when we make it the expert dom, we think of the, the hurdles for expert dom, which are learn the two letter words, three letter words, four letter words.
[00:21:50] But I think it's more about there are actually a lot of ways to be good there. There's a strong math component, there's a spatial [00:22:00] reasoning component. I have friends who are experts. Uh, their specialty will be, they just find nice plays. Just things that lock in to the fabric of the board creatively. I guess sometimes we're, we have this ideal of perfection, but I think really, what you want to do is just play.
[00:22:21] Come on, Woogles. Play games play people from all over the world and just we have a free analyzer I think it's the only one on the web that I'm aware of where you can just Leach s style you can just kick it up after a game and look at the moves you could have done instead Anyone can access it. It's not gated by any kind of paywall.
[00:22:43] It's never going to be gated by a paywall But anyone can just use that and learn. And I would just do that, play some fun games, pick one that you're interested in, crack open the analyzer and just take one or two ideas of, Oh yeah, I could've done that [00:23:00] sometimes it'll be a crazy word, but a lot of times it's just.
[00:23:03] It's a small play. We also have a puzzle
[00:23:05] Ceasar: mode, so the puzzle mode is nice because you just, you're just given a position and then you try to find the best play from your rack that would play in that board. And one of the cool things is that we specifically geared it so that more than 50 percent of the solutions are common, like everyday English words.
[00:23:22] Like we have some contributors on discord that actually created a common word language lexicon, right? Like a common English word lexicon. This one guy specifically like two or three years ago, he would like stream himself going through the dictionary and giant Excel spreadsheet and labeling words as common.
[00:23:37] He did this for like months. And finally, he whittled it down to about 40 or 50, 000 words that are words. Most of them are words that you and I, that you and I would recognize as common English words, but there's still a couple of that are kind of iffy. And there's still a couple that he left out that he probably should have put in there, but it's a really cool way for people to learn.
[00:23:55] Like, we can actually like newcomers could try that lexicon. Yeah. And that kind of [00:24:00] like one of the advantages of that is that it becomes a purely strategic game at that point because everybody knows his words and it's just about who can find them and who can make the best place like. And I think it's kind of like a nice thing for like, for example, for chess players who want to try our game and they don't want to learn like 100, 000 words to be competitive, they take words that they know from everyday life.
[00:24:19] So our puzzles, like many of them have these common word solutions, yet they're still very difficult because one thing is knowing it's a word. And the other thing is finding the word on the board for some, for some of them. And the puzzles are different. Ratings like our players have actually tried them and based on how many people solve them and how many people miss them, they get automatically rated.
[00:24:41] So then new players, they can, you know, if they miss a few of those of those harder puzzles, their ratings will go down and they'll try easy puzzles kind of bounce around. So, at any given time, we have like, 10 or so people doing puzzles, but sometimes it goes up. Like, when we release new puzzles, we have puzzles and.
[00:24:57] English, French, [00:25:00] German, I think. I think those are the three languages we support for puzzles. Yeah. Not quite Norwegian yet. We don't have enough games in that.
[00:25:08] Aaron: How many words is in that common lexicon dictionary versus, say, the American dictionary?
[00:25:13] Ceasar: I think the common lexicon has about 000. The American one has about 180, 000.
[00:25:19] Okay. But the ones that we care about, like, the ones that we really care about are, like, two through eight letter words. And those, I want to say, like, For the American one, it's closer to like 80 or 90, 000. Okay. And, and for the common one, maybe it's like 30, 000, 20 or 30, 000. I'm not exactly sure. But, but yeah, that's about the order of magnitude.
[00:25:38] Uh, the Collins dictionary has about maybe 120 or 130, 8 letter words. So it's quite, it's quite a bit more. But that's the international one that Jesse was talking about. It's really
[00:25:49] Aaron: interesting. I think, uh, it ties back to a lot of people don't realize on Wordle, like one of the things that really made that game [00:26:00] work is they, they narrowed down the dictionary of The five letter words to like 3, 000 common words that most people know.
[00:26:09] Yeah. And, uh, that's super intriguing. Are, do you guys play Wordle or is that too easy for you?
[00:26:16] Ceasar: It's fun. I think we all got a little bit into it. There's still some people who still play it every day. Like I see them on my Facebook wall, but, um, yeah, I got into it for a bit. It's not even that, that easy.
[00:26:24] It's just, uh, you know, it's, it's, we, we, we would love to like. Kind of riff on that idea, like I like these crazy, like, or you know, you have like four, four words at the same time or, or eight at the same time, but I haven't, I haven't really like gotten back into it
[00:26:39] Jesse: like for a few months. Yeah, we were thinking at one point about how do we achieve a similar level of virality, but with, with a word game or a simple word game and what are the components that make word also viral.
[00:26:52] And it's just, you can do it quickly. You're they keep basic counting stats so you can compare and share that out. And we [00:27:00] incorporated some of that to our site. We, I wouldn't say shamelessly copied, but we try to make positions shareable. I think we could go a lot further with it. It's like one of my, if I were working on this full time, that'd be one of the first things I'd try to, to crack because a lot of people are familiar with the game and I feel like you could do a little mini puzzle and People would be interested.
[00:27:26] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:27:26] Ceasar: You can share puzzles from a site and people can open up the puzzles and immediately show some of the screen. You can even share a gift of your like an animated gift of your, of your game. So put them on Twitter or something. So we did that for a few like famous games, like the finals of 2020, something like, like the, like we've, we've hosted a few world tournaments.
[00:27:45] So we can put up a gift. So either animated or, or static gifts. I'm like, what would you play here? Right. Export exportable right from our site. Cool. I'm just
[00:27:53] Joseph: seeing like YouTube bars with large play heads because you're anticipating the [00:28:00] next move, right? Like you're, you're just gaming total playback time on the,
[00:28:05] Aaron: yeah.
[00:28:07] I'm curious, uh, do you have other favorite word games besides Scrabble or playing on Woogles?
[00:28:13] Ceasar: I probably got into like Boggle, you know, like the boggle and boggle like games, like for, for a bit. Uh, I'm not very good at them, but every once in a while, I, I try to get good at it. Kind of need to use a different part of your brain.
[00:28:26] I feel like I know a lot of words, but there's people who are like 10 times better than me at boggle, no matter how much I
[00:28:32] Jesse: work on it. It's funny that you ask that because it's making me realize that I've, I feel like I've been on this single minded quest to be as good as Scrabble as possible. And sometimes the other games can feel like distractions or you can feel guilt like, Oh, I should be studying, but you have to mix in some, some more fun in there.
[00:28:52] So, I mean, one thing I like that we offer on our site is we have, um, clabbers, which is you can play [00:29:00] any shuffling of the letters. Of a real word. You could play any anagram we'd call it. And the, the boards look insane. They turn into these eight by eight, just cubes where everything, you could just add a letter if it can make a, make an anagram.
[00:29:19] It looks wild. You score like a thousand versus 900. We have a bot that does it. It'll just crush you and. Make you feel inadequate. So that would probably be my guilty pleasure is go in and play in the bottom, just getting smacked around a bit and reduce back to like marveling at computers, basically.
[00:29:39] Joseph: Fantastic. And so you marveling at computers, is that similar to what's the game Arrowless where you've like the letters are all mixed up and you have to type it out, but what you're saying is you can mix up the letters. And drop all the, yeah, call the real word. Got it. [00:30:00] The permutations on that are insane.
[00:30:02] Ceasar: Yeah. Like, I imagine you have the word cat. Well, you can, you can play that and then that's a word because, because it can anagram into cat and then you can imagine how, yeah, you can imagine how a board would get when every, every word could just be any permutation of it. So the fact that we have a bot and an analyzer for that is insane.
[00:30:18] Like nobody has built one like that. We have, we have a genius, uh, Singaporean programmer who. Who's who's on our team who comes up with crazy algorithms and he's a guy who who came up with that bot that can play clabbers like perfectly pretty
[00:30:31] Jesse: much. Yeah, one of the interesting tensions about running Woogles is that Cesar and I are very deep down the well and there is a crowd of probably a few thousand experts around the world who are similarly deep.
[00:30:45] And what they push us to build is just newer and crazier features. We have a challenge mode where you immediately lose if you play a fake word. But on the flip side, our mission, literally our mission as a non profit is to [00:31:00] expand the game and educate. And if we devote too much time to these crazy features, that actually is not going to do much for 95 to 98 percent of our user base who are literally just kids learning how to play the game.
[00:31:15] So we have to be pretty selective with how we balance. Kind of newcomer friendly features and appealing to our core demographic. This notion
[00:31:26] Joseph: of limited dictionary seems really cool, right? Like you're like here, learn these 200 words. All right now go, right? Okay. Now let's do 400. Let's do, and it would be the similar, like all words reversed, but just smaller.
[00:31:39] Anyway, that would help my. Tear filled fourth grade mind,
[00:31:46] Aaron: make, make it more accessible and make it way harder. Ready? Go. Go.
[00:31:51] Joseph: Yeah. You're working on both sides of the plot graph.
[00:31:55] Aaron: That's cool. You know, Cesar, I think we saw a little bit in your, your [00:32:00] background. Maybe you were. Programming a Casio when you were younger, building some games that way. I'm just curious, gaming at large, how'd you both get introduced and, uh, what was your experience there?
[00:32:12] So
[00:32:12] Ceasar: I used to live in Venezuela and, you know, we were the children of, um, like basically my dad was a U. S. Immigrant. So he would like have to live there most of the time and then he would come back to Venezuela. And it was, it was hard on us, right? Like it's like the family being split up a lot. Like I actually didn't spend, I spent a couple of years of my babyhood with my aunts who lived in Venezuela because my brother was there, so we were, we all needed to like kind of take care of him.
[00:32:38] And anyway, like we had a crazy situation like that, but I remember one of my happiest memories is when I was six. I mean, dad came. Came back in Venezuela. He brought me a Nintendo. It's an entertainment system. And I was like, what is this? And I got completely hooked up. It's like Mario dot com and Mario three and those type of games.
[00:32:56] So that's, that's how I got into gaming. And part of me was like, [00:33:00] how do people make this? Like, how can this happen? I couldn't believe that people could make a game. So I always had a brain that thought that way. So, so I remember my brother had a Casio calculator. He was about 10 years older than me. So he was already like in high school at the time, or maybe starting college.
[00:33:15] And I started just playing with it and I see what I could do. I could draw a little graphics, but it was all like, like, just making graphs, for example, it wasn't anything special, but then I realized I had a programming. So then I would just try different things in the program. And what have you got to print things out?
[00:33:28] I remember figuring out, like, an if statement, like, if this done that, like, I just figured it out. I just stumbled into it. There was an arrow. So I tried it out and I realized, oh, my God, this is an if statement. And once you have an if statement, you can pretty much build anything. And then I started building little, like, Number guessing games games that, like, I remember having a little dragon that would, like, catch eggs that fell from the top and just move it around.
[00:33:48] So that would do that. Like, once I moved to the US, I had a more powerful calculator. So I would do that all day. Like, I'm going to make these little games for my, uh, for my friends. Like, I remember I made a little tic tac toe game. [00:34:00] And I didn't know much about how to program the kind of stuff right now.
[00:34:02] Now I know how to program a perfect tic tac toe game, but back then I probably just gave it a bunch of conditions, but still nobody could beat it. And then this girl that sat behind me in science class, she would always ask for my calculator so she could play it instead of paying attention to class. And then one day she shows me she beat it.
[00:34:17] I was like, what? How did you beat it? She showed me that she had beaten the tic tac toe bot. Then I had to go and debug and figure out how she did that. That's the kind of stuff I would do. And this is even before I owned a computer. We didn't get a computer until I was about like 14 or something. And then I was able to actually learn how to program on a computer with QBasic and C, C I was always in that world.
[00:34:38] I would learn from books. And then I started taking more CS classes. You know, the internet started getting better at teaching you that kind of stuff. But I was never like formally trained in CS. When I went to college, I still studied electrical engineering. Mostly because I wanted to not be on a computer all day, but that's my life.
[00:34:56] I'm a, I'm a programmer by day and by night, you know, I got away [00:35:00] from it for a little bit, but it's cool
[00:35:02] Jesse: too. I was going to say one thing, which is, uh, I think it's fascinating how dependent your gaming trajectory is on exactly how old you are within a couple of years. You can pinpoint how old I am because I had a Game Boy in my hands at three, uh, with Dr.
[00:35:20] Mario and Super Mario, and I had one of those big doorstop cube Macs that I would play, uh, educational games on, like Spelunx or Math Blaster, uh, And this stuff will mean absolutely nothing to anyone who's not exactly in my age range. And to anyone who is, I'll be like, Oh, Math Blaster. Yes. I remember Math Blaster.
[00:35:46] Yeah, but I was also in that pocket of people who didn't have universal internet all the time. Like universal fast internet. Like I remember modems dialing up. I've always thought if I were born five [00:36:00] years later. And like I went to college when there was stuff like League of Legends, I would not have graduated or at least it would have, there would have been some kind of a, a reckoning, but you know, this is kind of the, the word gaming was kind of the best that it was online.
[00:36:18] It was against many people simultaneously. So I think that competitive aspect was, was, uh, like I was playing online boggle on the site called tangle word when I was 11. I would get my mom to help me, like, we would be cheating, like, I'd be on the keyboard, my mom would be doing the mouse. It would still, like, lose, but it still felt kind of like, yeah, so, yeah, but it's funny that our trajectory could have been so different if we'd been born five years later, we would just had, like, these.
[00:36:48] Giant multiplayer online games and yeah, maybe our attention would have gone a completely different direction. Yeah, but there's still interest in Scrabble That's the crazy thing. It's like even with all the shiny stuff out there people [00:37:00] still want to play. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah
[00:37:01] Ceasar: for sure That's all those games.
[00:37:03] Yeah, that's about games And I was mostly talking about coding but in general like like all those games started coming up Yeah, when I was already graduated from high school and maybe even college, but I remember in high school, I would play Starcraft a lot. That game was awesome. The original Starcraft and it had a modem.
[00:37:20] And then every once in a while, like it would freeze. So my only friends would wait 30 seconds for me to come back. And sometimes my mom would pick up the phone and I would be like, Oh, no. No more Starcraft.
[00:37:33] Aaron: I think there's something interesting here just about the timelessness of some games like Scrabble and others that you think there's a timelessness, but it is there.
[00:37:42] And what I mean by that is like, I played so much Mario Kart 64. I got pretty good at it, but these days, like my son wants to play Mario cart on the switch and I, I kind of refuse to, cause I know he's going to beat me, but I'm like, can we, can we break out the Mario [00:38:00] cart 64? Cause cause I got it. I got it.
[00:38:03] Joseph: My son wants to play Madden and I'm like, ah, now I have to learn football and dexterity. No, I don't, I don't have your controller. Like. The original Nintendo had many fewer buttons than your controller.
[00:38:17] Ceasar: Oh, yeah, yeah. That's crazy. Xbox controllers.
[00:38:20] Jesse: I think I played a Madden online league in like 2000 or 2001.
[00:38:25] Like they randomly had the ability to play online and then they deprecated it for years because it was buggy as hell. But it's fascinating that all these games evolved towards this online competition. Aspect. And then of course there's cheating immediately. That's anytime you have any kind of online competition, you have cheating, which we have to think about a bunch ourselves, but it's like fascinating how it's an emergent property of any, any good game.
[00:38:52] It's like, okay, now I got to duke it out. I got someone else. Yeah.
[00:38:55] Aaron: Earlier we, we talked about Cesar. You've got, you know, bit of a startup background [00:39:00] and some decisions were made for great reasons on, on why to create Google's as a five Oh one C three. How would you compare kind of the difference between starting and running and launching a non profit versus, uh, doing the same in the startup world?
[00:39:16] What do you like more? What's, what's not as good? Yeah, just what's the difference?
[00:39:20] Ceasar: I actually think there's a lot of similarities between the two. Like, I've done a startup before. I'm doing one right now. Back in 20, 2011, I did a startup with Y Combinator. We actually were able to get it off the ground, almost ran out of money, and then Non staff, and we were actually able to have a nice exit in 2014.
[00:39:38] Um, you know, decent one. We, we got acquired by, by a big company in San Francisco. And since then I've been itching into another, another startup because it was, it was a fun thing. It was very stressful, obviously, like there's a ton of work, a ton of like uncertainty. And then in 2017 or so, end of 2017, I, I took a job.
[00:39:55] Jesse referred me to his company that he worked at at the time, and they ended up [00:40:00] interviewing. I took a job there, so I moved back east. And that was another startup, even though it was, it was later a lot, but then once the pandemic hit, we saw this as an opportunity to do another, uh, startup, like apply the same lessons that you would do to a startup to creating Woogles.
[00:40:13] Like, we, we created, we did a Kickstarter, like raised money with mock ups that. That we're not like, what the existing site has is a little bit like a lot of companies do that where they like, create a mock up and then they see is there actually interest in this idea? And actually, we're considering doing the same thing for my current startup.
[00:40:30] I was telling my, my co founder, who is the same co founder who I worked with 10 years ago. I was telling him, hey, why don't you just make a mock up for all of these? And we put them on our site and then. You know, ask people to show interest. We'll make those those pages. So, so we did have something similar for vocals where we created these beautiful mock ups and then during the few months after the Kickstarter finished, it took us like three or four months to launch.
[00:40:52] You know, we made those mock ups come to life. There was a ton of work. Like, I remember we needed to get out of tournament mode. Before this [00:41:00] big New Orleans tournament, is it the New Orleans tournament that happens every year and they wanted to host it on our site during the pandemic. So, there was like sleepless nights, like, literally, like, I slept like half an hour the night before because we're still having issues with the tournament mode.
[00:41:13] And then at the end, everything worked great. There was a little bit of a. A panic moment where the tournament mode broke in the middle of starting the next round and one of our team members, Lola, like, she figured out the solution. Like, she's know exactly what was happening. And I was able to get into the server, make a couple edits and reboot it.
[00:41:32] And then the tournament went great after that. And that was, that was awesome. I think there was a lot of panic and stress there, like, behind the scenes, but then. People were screaming the tournament. They, they didn't like let that come through. They, they said, okay, everything's going great. There's a little bit of a technical delays, a little hiccup here and there, but then everybody was very good.
[00:41:49] They were raving about the tournament to give us donations. I thought that was really nice. But there was a lot of those panic moments. There was a lot of, uh, a lot of like, there was a little bit of tension too, between like, Doing things kind of the startup way, [00:42:00] which is to release features, and then you iterate upon them versus releasing something that's super polished, but might not get used as much.
[00:42:07] There was a little bit of back and forth there, where me and the other team members, we would discuss like, what our next feature should look like. But the fact that, you know, it was a 501c3, like, we're not here to make a profit, and there's no real, like, deadlines. Like we, we do, we set our own pace that also makes it feel a little more relaxed as well.
[00:42:26] Like we, we decided to not give ourselves deadlines anymore. Kind of like we did for the tournament. That was really stressful for the tournament mode. So after that, like we've taken it a little bit easier, I
[00:42:34] Jesse: would say. Yeah. I think that's super interesting about working on a nonprofit or, I mean, Woogles is basically a nonprofit foundation or in that mold.
[00:42:41] And the thing that's super interesting about that versus a profit motive is that when you have a profit motive, you can basically make any decision as a CEO in the, especially as a startup, you have to do pretty radical and often brutal things to just stay alive because that is the paramount concern.
[00:42:59] And we're trying to [00:43:00] stay alive. And I mean, we have to, we have operating costs, right? So it's, it's kind of similar with Woogles, but the people who are contributing or volunteering, everyone, everyone has, who has worked on this, was volunteering their time. And the result is, I feel like when you're in charge of something like that, you actually spend more time on sort of, uh, you spend more time on ego management.
[00:43:22] Everyone who's there has a different reason for being there. They all have different goals, whether it's personal skill development, whether it's something really altruistic, whether it's something very actually self minded, like I'm going to create a portfolio and this is going to be part of my portfolio.
[00:43:37] So you actually spend a lot more time kind of getting everyone to lock in because everyone's goals are slightly different and you can't really expect them to all be super aligned. Everyone is investing time in this nonprofit. Above and beyond their day jobs, and they're all trying to get something distinct out of it.
[00:43:57] So you're just trying to find that nexus [00:44:00] that binds people. And when you're doing at will employment at a startup, it's a little different. It's like, I am setting the goal, and you will follow my goal, and I will pay you a salary. We do not have that option by comparison. Yeah, totally agree on
[00:44:14] Ceasar: that. We have to do a little bit of managing, like, yeah, people, people's egos, I would say it's not as bad as it sounds.
[00:44:21] Right. But, but, yeah, it's, it's actually really important on the business development side, as well as even on the coding side, people have different coding styles, different ideas for what the licenses should be. You know, you have to kind of keep that on the line, either try to set a vision or try to let them get their.
[00:44:36] Pieces of their vision through so that they can continue to be motivated to work on it. So, yeah, it's a little bit of a
[00:44:42] Aaron: juggling game there. Well said. Well, well, kudos to you guys for spinning this up. I mean, the, for a nonprofit, the site looks amazing. You've built some amazing things. It does look like if you go to woogles.
[00:44:54] io and you look for the, uh, support woogles link, there's a, a [00:45:00] link to do a one time donation there or a monthly donation here. Hey, good game. I know we'll put in a contribution and, and just, uh, really appreciate what you guys are doing too. Advanced, not just the Scrabble community, but learning at large.
[00:45:14] And I think that's pretty awesome. Jesse and Cesar, if, if people want to reach out to you, is there a good place for people to find you online? Yeah.
[00:45:23] Ceasar: You can say wogles at wogles. io or you can try our first names at wogles. io. Maybe the Woogles and Woogles might be better. You just want to ask the company, us, anything.
[00:45:32] Aaron: Right on. Well, Cesar, Jesse, uh, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate you taking time with us. Yeah, for
[00:45:39] Jesse: sure. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you
[00:45:41] Ceasar: so much for having us. Absolutely.
