My wife and I love to play the word game blossom. If you haven’t played you should try it. We usually start by spending a few minutes brainstorming words and writing them down. Then we figure out which word would be the best to play for each bonus letter (petal). This involves some tricky calculations and I was thinking it would be fun to create a spreadsheet that would calculate the score for my possible words automatically, before I play them.

I spent some time this morning experimenting and came up with something that works. You start by entering the center letter in the red cell, and the 6 bonus letters in the yellow cells. The order of the yellow cells doesn’t matter.

Then you type your initial words in the first column. Each word will generate 6 scores – one for each of the petals. The highest score(s) will be highlighted in green which tells you which letter would be the best play for that word. One limitation, it can currently only calculate up to 8 uses of a bonus letter, but so far I haven’t found a word that uses 8 of the same letter.  If you want to play a word you enter the current petal letter into the second column of the spreadsheet.  This adds it to your spreadsheet total score based on playing it for that bonus letter.

Note, that this spreadsheet doesn’t suggest words for you. It also doesn’t confirm that your word is valid. All it does is let you know what the word would score if you played it, and lets you see the best ‘petal’ letter to play that word.  So I don’t consider this cheating.

You can download it here for free.