Memorializing Babble Royale

This blog is now 2 years old. I am still here, and you can expect a few backlogged posts to come out soon. This post is how I am choosing to get back into writing.

The free-to-play word game “Babble Royale” is about a month younger than this blog, having released in December 2021. One of the earliest posts on this blog is a brief introduction to the game and strategy. I loved the game a lot, and became heavily involved in its community. However, for all intents and purposes, Babble Royale is now dead. The past 2 years have included its entire short but beautiful life. In memory, let’s take a little time to reflect on how that life has passed.

The Premise

Babble Royale contained all the battle-royale tropes, but in a word game. It was often described as Scrabble meets Fortnite. 16 players join a lobby, and then drop in from the sky as Scrabble tiles, onto a large square grid.

In the beginning, every player always began as the letter A. Over time, the developers added the option to change the starting tile to a letter of your choosing. Being that every word you played had to connect to your current active word, common letters were always advantageous. For a challenge, high skill players would sometimes pick to start as more awkward letters, including Q. Here’s a commentated game I uploaded to YouTube of me doing just that.

Skill Level

Babble Royale never implemented skill-based match making. The lobbies consisted of whichever group of players all joined a lobby at the same time. If you wanted to play against a friend, you could just coordinate to click “Join” at the same time. This had a few knock on effects:

Stream Sniping

At various points through the early months of the game, Babble Royale made it to the screens of xQc, Forsen, and other streamers with large audiences. Since it is free to play, many of the thousands of people in their chats would get the game solely to try to join the same lobby as the streamer. Dozens of lobbies would pop in an instant, largely consisting of players whose only goal was to land directly on top of some streamer and emerge as the killer. For an example of this chaos, here’s Forsen’s upload:

For those who wanted higher skill games during these periods, well, they were somewhat out of luck.

Golden Royales

The Q start game I uploaded above was in a “Golden Royale”. This is a special game mode that occurs randomly, changing only the visuals and the post-game rewards. The trigger for a Golden Royale gets more likely, the more players in the lobby are holding Golden Tickets. These tickets come from earning a win in an ordinary game. Many top players have accrued hundreds or even thousands of them. The only way to cash them in is when a lobby becomes a Golden Royale, in which all players who do carry tickets lose one for entering. Others who are in the lobby without tickets are able to play for the big rewards even without spending a ticket of their own.

This mechanic implies a certain steady state frequency of Golden Royales. Assuming every lobby has 16 players, the curve of likelihood based on number of players holding tickets seems to make it some single digit percentage of games.

In Golden Royales, you could assume that you were up against a slightly higher skilled lobby, statistically.

Shark Tank

Without actually implementing any changes to the game, the developers could still encourage skilled players to play against each other. Their solution was a simple news bulletin, viewable in the game’s home screen. “Shark Tank: Saturdays 6pm EDT/ 3pm PDT. Enter at your own risk.”

Shark Tank formalized a schedule that a few top players had already established on the discord. It never had a specified duration, but would typically last 2-3 hours. The tryhards would be able to expect other tryhards to be playing, and this self-reinforcing cycle led to some of the highest skill games. Some of the best players would also stream. Stream sniping in that case could now be used to condense us all into one lobby. You weren’t safe from long word combos across the screen. You weren’t safe from an opponent who just ran into the hot zone and survived buying and finding medpacks. This was peak Babble Royale.

A few clips from these good games:

5cr4bb13 getting a 3 word combo on Blgke

5cr4bb13 getting a kill using the word DILAPIDATES

A tense final 1v1 between Wanderer15 and Best459

axcertypo getting a final kill with a funny word

Leaderboards

While Babble Royale never had skill based match making, the developers did add ways for players to determine skill. First was simply “MMR”. That is an amusing statistic, considering that the acronym for “matchmaking rating” definitely never impacted matchmaking.

Your MMR would update after every game, depending on the other players in the lobby and their MMRs, along with your final placement in the game. Like with Golden Royales, this would tend statistically toward a steady state so long as lobbies were always 16 players.

After some time, the developers officially set MMR tiers, along with adding two new statistics to measure:

Kill Streaks

How many kills can you get across 10 consecutive games? As opposed to shark tank lobbies where the goal was to be evenly matched with other, these streaks really encouraged good players to try to be the only good player in their lobby. The optimal kill streak run would luck into 10 consecutive lobbies with 15 other players who weren’t good enough to kill each other, let alone you. This was a sort of perverse incentive and may have helped spell the downfall of this game.

It’s certainly hilarious to watch a pro completely dunk on new players. But, the small population of pros could not sustain the game on their own. And the new players weren’t having a great experience with it.

Level Streaks

Level streaks were slightly less problematic. Levels are accrued by getting points by playing long words, rack clears, or using bonus tiles on the board. A good level streak player would completely disengage from combat, trying their best to sit off to the side of a lobby taking up space and playing very long words. Your level-focused games could end with all other players dying, without you ever even touching them. Some of the best level-focused games I played, included both me and 5cr4bb13 sitting on opposite corners of a lobby with all others dead, trying to prolong the game as far as possible while leveling in the hot zone.

In the later days of mostly empty lobbies, 5cr4bb13 and I both enjoyed the near-single-player experience of level farming. He even made a couple of Babble Royale montages out of it:

Looking back, I wish that Babble Royale implemented a true single-player mode for level streaks, and a mode with bot players for kill streaks. These could still be farmed to this day, if not for the other problem (more later).

Other Leaderboards

Beyond MMR, Kill streak, and Level streak, there were some other Babble Royale leaderboards.

First you had the averages for placement, kill count, and level across all games the player has ever played. Many of these were dominated by players who played very few times (even 0 times, which would lead to an unbeatable 0.00 average place). Or cheaters, who managed a miraculous 5000 kill-per-game average in a game with 16 player lobbies.

There were leaderboards around total number of lifetime games played, wins, and kills. There were leaderboards around highest single game kill count or level count, which resembled the streak versions of the same.

Through the shark tanks, the discord community, and the leaderboards, a few top players emerged.

The Elite Players

Most of the top players came in with a combination of word game skill, and video game skill. Among the word game pros were a couple of well known professional scrabble players Will Anderson (wanderer15) and Josh Sokol (axcertypo). There were also several players whose full names I don’t know offhand but who are also scrabble pros, including 5cr4bb13, fizzix_is_fun, bynak, and ancient cosmographer. 5cr4bb13 in particular has retained the top spot on almost every leaderboard.

Will and Josh have rather popular YouTube channels. Here are videos from each of them, about the other:

It wasn’t all professional Scrabblers though. Some of us came in with solid enough word knowledge, and general mechanical proficiency that allowed us to keep at the top that way. I include myself on that list, along with Best459, Morraconda, asianpyro, and NML (acriter).

There are other elite players beyond those named so far, and I would be remiss to exclude players like JackOfAllSpades98, listeme (elmiest), gurchy (emma), ReignTorrential, 99% sneaky, Glenjamin, personman, ycz6, Blast_Toys123, TabletopHotdish, SaintMonday (also a pro scrabble player), shabado, stjtb7650, kilolo, rtrb, or daniel from the conversation entirely. But the reason I focused on those I did, is because of the fun little reward the developers provided us in mid 2022.

Season Zero Champions

On July 1, 2022, everyone’s MMR reset in preparation for a new “season” of Babble Royale. Those who were at the top of the MMR leaderboard at the time of reset, were each given the opportunity to add a new word to the dictionary. It could be any string, for any reason, so long as it wasn’t already removed as vulgar.

The official update was announced here. The 12 words added spanned memes, strategy, and a curious story about a bot player.

From 5cr4bb13 you had LIGMA. Will Anderson added UWU. Josh Sokol added WOOGLES, referencing a popular Scrabble site, woogles.io. Fizzix added POG, while NML added YEET. Ancient Cosmographer added QBAP.

Asianpyro added OK, which had often been called out as one of the most frustrating misses from the original dictionary. OK was added for official Scrabble play in 2018 but it had not been on the wordnik list that was sourced for Babble Royale.

Morraconda and I had the same idea, adding II and VI respectively.

Bynak and Best459 colluded to add AIAIAIA and AIAIAIAIA, building upon the existing nonsense word AIAIA that somehow made it into the original dictionary. There was an informal speedrun to play each of these words. There was also a community rule that players whose active word was AIAIA or an extension, could not be killed honorably.

BBQ

BBQ also was added to the dictionary, but not because of a person choosing to add it. Rather, BBQ was the name of a bot player that managed to also crack into the top few by MMR. Some bot players were too superhuman, such as a bot whose name was only visible as □. It did get kicked. But for BBQ, the developers found it to be straddling the line of tolerable, and kept it around. The word BBQ became playable in Babble Royale partly as a thank you to the players who put up with it.

One cool BBQ moment was Will Anderson’s kill here.

Fun things to do in Babble Royale

Some of the fun from Babble Royale was just hanging out in twitch streams with players. In game, there was intended gameplay, or clip farming for a montage, or AIAIAIAIA% speedrunning, sure. But here are other ways we enjoyed the game:

Secret Words

You could get separate achievements on steam for playing any of the three words BABBLE, ROYALE, and ACHIEVEMENT. Of the three, ACHIEVEMENT was clearly the hardest, being an 11 letter word. The typical strategy was to get ACHIEVE down, go far enough away to reroll your tiles a bunch of times without blowing up any of the letters in ACHIEVE, and then come back to extend it to ACHIEVEMENT. BABBLE also took some setup, having 3 Bs which was hard to get on one rack using the game’s vaguely-bag-based tile draw system.

What’s funny though, is that ROYALE was initially impossible. It wasn’t in the dictionary, and there was no way to make your active word an invalid word. They quickly added it to the dictionary to enable players to get the achievement.

Gutenberg

Rob Dubbin was a writer for Stephen Colbert’s TV shows. In Babble Royale, under the name dubbin, he also organized “Gutenberg Babble”. It combined several technical feats. Firstly, Glenjamin and LittleEndu had come up with a way to scrape the game’s logging system for all the words played by any player during a game. This had already been used for an online replay viewer.

Dubbin, with help from Fizzix on bot stuff and donated log files from me and 5cr4bb13, created a twitch bot. Using the scraper, this bot scraped any game dubbin played, looked for all played words, and then scanned the entirety of Project Gutenberg (a library of over 70,000 free eBooks) to see what sentences from literature could be created using words played in that game. Sentences needed to be 5 or more words. They could not use the words “A” or “I” as these were not playable words in Babble Royale. Punctuation was ignored.

Gutenberg in practice

In Gutenberg Babble, the lobby had a shared goal, completely detached from the game’s intentions. We were to play real, common words, and not kill each other. Pronouns like HE, HIM, HIS, SHE, HER, HERS, YOU, YOUR, WE, US, OUR, ME, MY were extremely valuable. Common verbs like SAY/SAYS/SAYING/SAID, BE/IS/WAS/ARE, GO/GOING/WENT, DO/DOING/DID/DONE, were valuable as well. Your WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, and WHY meant that W and H grew immensely in value, especially H with THE, THAT and THIS also using the letter.

The resulting sentences were things like “He is quite able to do it”, usually pretty tame by literary standards but fun to try and unlock with Babble gameplay. If single-player Babble Royale comes alive in the future, solo Gutenberg runs may also be a fun outlet. At the time of writing, the best individual game hit 318 distinct sentences in Project Gutenberg under the restrictions. 80 distinct words contributed, with over half of the sentences containing the most valuable word: TO.

Archiethon

The Celeste community has a yearly fundraiser towards trans causes, in which members of the community play non-celeste games. This is called Archiethon, named after Archie the bird. Organizer AChocolateOrange (aco) loved Babble Royale, but had to come up with a way to get it to make sense on a big stage. Ultimately, aco invited Morraconda and me to join them on the virtual stage. We would stream 3 perspectives of the same lobby, which was going to be hosted on a private server.

A private server was a new thing for Babble Royale. We approached the developers with a plan and a request, and they were very accommodating. We had our first ever truly private lobby while testing out the feature in advance of Archiethon. On game day, the handful of top players we had invited to join us on this private server, all gathered for an hour to show off some of the joy of Babble Royale across several games.

One of the highlights was in the final game, when the rest of the lobby coordinated to set their starting tiles to spell out the word CELESTE in the center.

There’s a funny second narrative around the Archiethon group, but that is a story for a different post.

Outside of Babble Royale

The community connections helped foster love for games besides Babble Royale. It’s always beautiful how bringing people together about one thing, expands each person’s horizon on what they can do and what they will enjoy. The discord had a handful of conversations over time about other word games. I myself had not played Scrabble in many years, being mostly a Ruzzle (Boggle) player since college. But when Josh Sokol invited people to play against him in Scrabble on the then-new playscrabble.com, I took it up. I bring it up in this blog post as a massive flex, because I actually won.

The thumbnail is an old photo of me from github, morphing into the face of Nigel Richards, famously the best Scrabble player in the world. But Nigel is from New Zealand, and restricted just to North America the best is Josh Sokol, my opponent.

I managed to get good tiles, and find the great plays with them. In the end, I won with a score of 537 to Josh’s 431. Much like the Babble Royale leaderboards where players with low game count can camp on their stats to maintain a really good average, that’s how I’ve treated Scrabble since this moment. I can say I have a perfect record in Scrabble against professionals, with an average score of 537.

My mom and I played Scrabble many times when I was a child. I knew a good amount of the strategy and useful words. But, this game was still an outlier by every metric. It remains the only game of Scrabble I have played this decade.

What actually killed Babble Royale

Time for the sad part.

The developers of Babble Royale are “Everybody House Games”, a father-son duo consisting of Frank and James Lantz. This is not a large or experienced team. With good intentions but poor planning, the game lived mostly as a passion project and not as a sustainable model.

Part of the passion project angle, was wanting to tailor the game to best suit the elite level players. Frank and James were motivated by the idea that this could become an esport. This came at the significant expense of care for the bulk of the playerbase. If you weren’t playing to get good, the developers didn’t see much value in your business. In most cases they thus failed to retain your interest.

This led to lobbies no longer filling up to 16. Not enough people stuck around. Lobbies would instead pop whenever there were at least 2 players, and no new player had joined in 30 seconds. All of the assumptions of 16 player lobbies, for kill streaks and MMR and Golden Royales, became faulty.

Financial Issues

The financial side of the game was based on opt-in microtransactions. On principle, nothing you could purchase would ever impact gameplay, just be cosmetic enhancement. There is an argument to be made that even this wasn’t followed, as certain tile skins or kill sounds were more distracting than the default. At any rate, this principled approach also kept the options for purchases very limited.

They did make a “free to play sucks lifetime pass” for $60, and I did buy it. This made everything that would ever be locked behind payment, for the rest of time, free to me. I had hope in this game lasting. Perhaps I could get that money’s worth in the future. And even if not, I could support a studio that was making things I love. I think not many people did end up buying it.

There was never much to buy, and never much reason to buy it. Despite thousands of concurrent players during the days of big streamers, Frank and James certainly lost money on this game.

Other Priorities

During mid 2022, shortly after the season reset, Frank and James just sort of dropped off the radar. I don’t know details, but I did hear about a family emergency. Being a family owned studio, that could halt the entire studio’s existence. The promise of future expansions, incentives, new items, all evaporated. All we had was what we already had gotten.

Dying Servers

In 2023, the servers began to fail. When playing the game, your local client has to maintain connection to a global server. Whenever the connection is severed, your local client can still limp along, presenting the facade of a playable game, but things stop working. Valid words do not submit. You can blow up your active word, because server and client do not agree which word it is.

If the servers don’t work, there’s nothing to do.

Gurchy has determined that a game only survives around 30 seconds. If in 30 seconds, you can still reach the “Last Word” screen, then you credit someone with a win. But any longer games, and all players must individually surrender back to lobby after the servers go down.

Hope

I want to make this blog post as visible as I can, to either the original developers or someone who is interested in taking over to revive Babble Royale. I don’t consider myself to be a super large platform, but I do reach more than zero people.

A while ago, I placed a few different games I have spent time with into different regions on a 2D graph (original, as a template if you are interested). Babble Royale was in a sweet spot, and something I could absolutely fall back in love with if it weren’t impossible to play today.

But most likely, the game will never exist in its former glory again. And that is sad, but is also ok. Life is about many things, and for today I’ll just write down my thoughts and love for this one thing. Tomorrow, I’ll move on.