I’m a big fan of word games. I’ll play Scrabble or Bananagrams whenever I can find a willing partner (finding a willing partner is the hard part). So when I saw an ad for Q-Less, a solo word game based on dice, I knew I had to try it out.

Q-Less Mechanics

A game of Q-Less starts by rolling the 12 letter-covered dice. Each roll gives you a random set of 12 letters. Using all 12 letters, you have to spell words that connect just like in Scrabble or Bananagrams.

My first thought was: can I play this game with the Scrabble or Bananagrams tiles that I already have?

Dice-Less Q-Less

The dice in Q-Less provide 2 important things to the game:

1. The set of letters that are possible to roll
2. A way to randomly select from that set of letters (rolling the dice)

If I could find the set of letters possible to roll, I could write a simple program to “roll” the dice for me and generate a set of 12 letters which I could then pick out from my set of letter tiles (provided I had enough tiles).

First I found the list of dice and their face values here. I later verified this list to be accurate with my own Q-Less dice (yes, I eventually bought the game for myself).

Necessary Tiles

Once I knew what the dice looked like, I needed to verify if Scrabble and/or Bananagrams had the tiles sufficient to support all possible rolls. I found the number of each letter tile in Scrabble and Bananagrams conveniently listed here. I then wrote a simple script to calculate the number of each letter tile needed to cover every possible Q-Less roll, shown in the following table:

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M
2	3	2	3	2	2	2	2	2	1	2	3	2

N	O	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z
3	3	2	0	3	2	3	1	1	2	1	2	1

const dieSides = 6;
const dice = [
	"MMLLBY",
	"VFGKPP",
	"HHNNRR",
	"DFRLLW",
	"RRDLGG",
	"XKBSZN",
	"WHHTTP",
	"CCBTJD",
	"CCMTTS",
	"OIINNY",
	"AEIOUU",
	"AAEEOO"
]

// print out stats on how many of each letter tile is needed
// answers the question "how many dice does this letter show up on"
function letterStats()
{
	const numLetters = 26;
	const charCodeA = 65;

	let alphabet = new Array(numLetters).fill(0);
	dice.forEach( die =>
	{
		let lettersSeen = new Set();
		for (let i=0; i < dieSides; i++)
		{
			let alphaIndex = die.charCodeAt(i) - charCodeA;
			lettersSeen.add(alphaIndex);
		}
		lettersSeen.forEach( alphaIndex =>
		{
			alphabet[alphaIndex]++;
		});
	});

	for (let i=0; i < numLetters; i++)
	{
		let letter = String.fromCharCode(charCodeA + i);
		console.log(letter + ": " + alphabet[i]);
	}
}

So indeed, the tiles needed for Q-Less are a subset of the tiles included with Scrabble and Bananagrams.

Rolling the Dice

From here, it was trivial to write some JavaScript to generate my Q-Less “roll”:

Playing the Game

Using the table above, I set aside only the set of tiles needed to play Q-Less from my Bananagrams tiles, into a separate bag. This makes it slightly easier to dig through the tiles for each roll. Then I roll the dice using the script above, pick out those letters from my tiles, and play a round of Dice-Less Q-Less.

Conclusion

While I had fun with this little challenge and enjoyed being able to try before I buy, I did end up purchasing Q-Less for myself and for a friend. If you do end up using this method to play the game, and you enjoy it, I would definitely recommend supporting the creator of the game and purchasing it. Rolling the dice is actually a lot more satisfying than picking out the tiles anyway.