GHOST - The addictive word game

The game

Ghost is a word game in which players take turns adding letters to a word fragment. The goal is to continually be in the process of making a word, without having said word be made on one's turn. Words generally follow the mold of Scrabble: no proper nouns, no foreign languages, etc. In addition, only words four letters long or longer count in Ghost. Whoever adds a letter to the fragment that makes a valid word longer than three letters, loses the game. Since the fragment must always be in the process of making a word, one can opt not to add to the fragment but rather to "challenge." The challenge has two possible outcomes: there was no word being made and the last player to add a letter loses, or there was a word being made and the player to challenge loses.

From these simple rules arises a game of intriguing complexity. Bluffing, by adding a letter while not actually having a word in mind, is a common tactic. In real-life games, Ghost can approach a Poker-like intensity, with constant bluffing and attempts to mask one's true intentions. Strategies centering around common word formations exist, and players quickly develop preferences for various letters and positions.

Some variants of Ghost exist in addition to vanilla Ghost (nnn*). They are Superghost and Xghost, and they add additional variety and depth to the game. Superghost is played by adding letters to either the beginning or the end of a word (*nnn*), and in Xghost, letters can be added anywhere within the word (*n*n*n*). Though Xghost can be daunting for casual Ghost fans, many experienced players quickly move beyond vanilla Ghost and find Superghost to be the best balance of simplicity and depth.

Ghost can be complex, so some of the links (below) may shed further light on the vagaries of the game.

The script

One can play Ghost in the car, on the bus, at home, at dinner... wherever good times are had. Ghost doesn't require any materials to play (although some like to keep a dictionary around for checking challenges). The focus of this page, however, is the online Ghost script that I have written for my mIRC bot, EmeraldBOT. It is an implementation of all three Ghost types with records, wagers, and user accounts. The script is available and running on the EsperNet IRC network, in the channel #ghost, and anyone is welcome to come and try it out. It can also be downloaded from this page to run in one's own IRC channel. For more about IRC or a decent Windows IRC client (required to run the Ghost scripts), see mIRC.

IRC Info
Server: irc.esper.net
Port: 6667
Channel: #ghost
Operators: Andre, EmeraldBOT, G, Koushiro

Known Bugs
- I'm pretty sure all the bugs are worked out. If you find any, let me know.

Downloads
These are the files to run the Ghost game in mIRC. They're all required inasmuch as the main ghost.mrc script is dependent on them, but it is certainly possible to modify that script to exclude economy.mrc, for example.
NOTE: Nothing will work unless you set the %ghost, %superghost, and %xghost variables to 0 before playing. To do this, you can edit the variable tab in the scripts editor, or just type /set %ghost 0 (and same for %superghost and %xghost) into the mIRC editbox.
ghost.mrc - this is the core code for Ghost, as well as records. The game itself is played using three main commands: !ghost, which has the initialization and setup for each Ghost variant (!ghost on, !ghost xon, !ghost superon), !gu, the letter-adding command for all three variants, and !challenge, the challenge command for all three variants. It also has records of wins, losses, games played, successful challenges (resulting in a bonus), failed challenges, successful bluffs (someone else's failed challenge), failed bluffs (someone else's successful challenge), and win percentage.
economy.mrc - this script sets up an economy with user accounts, money, and transfers. It allows for wagering Emeralds (the currency) on games of Ghost and keeping them in optionally password-protected user accounts. Ghost.mrc calls the various economy commands but can be modified not to do so if one so chooses. It also features the Interbank protocol, which can be implemented in another IRC bot to allow conversions of Emeralds into other bot currencies. For more about this feature, e-mail me.
WORDLIST.TXT - a slightly modified version of the ENABLE public domain word list. It has no words in it shorter than four letters.
btglobalx.mrc - contains some text-parsing commands that allow everything to run smoothly. This is required even though it doesn't seem like it does much.

Links & More Info
Ghost (game) article on Wikipedia
Kevin's Word List Page
Write On Reader - Word Games - GHOST
Words & Stuff - g is for ghost
Party Game - Ghost - from Partydirectory.com