To begin, go to the Quarry section of the website.
First, select how many letters your block will contain. The larger the block, the longer your story can be and the more time it takes to carve. It takes a surprisingly large number of letters to carve a story. For example, 1,000 letters yield only a couple sentences, whereas you will be able to create a paragraph out of a block of 5,000 letters.
Next, select what type of ‘marble’ you want. All blocks contain a sequence of letters that come from our proprietary random letter generators. You might consider starting with ‘Pietrasanta,’ since those letter sequences contain more vowels and make it easier to create words. ‘Carrara’ marble is a more challenging setting and is the true test of the sculptor.
Clicking ‘Play’ takes you to the game play screen. When you are ready for time to start, click ‘Begin.’ You will see the time remaining counting down at the top of the screen. Once time begins, click wherever you like in the letter block and use your keyboard to delete excess letters. You may use your mouse to highlight and delete entire swaths of letters, which is more time efficient. You are not allowed to add or rearrange letters, but you may add spaces between words as well as punctuation marks (. , ; : “ ‘ ? !).
When time runs out, you will be offered the option to add more time, save the story you created to your gallery, or delete the story.
Multiple Players
It is exciting to play Word David™ with your friends. You will be amazed at the different stories you create from the same sequence of letters. Every word artist finds something different in her block.
You can play Word David™ with your friends in person like a boardgame, over a videoconference feed if you are in different places, or even at different times. Whenever you play the game, you will see a serial number at the bottom of the screen. This number uniquely identifies the specific block you are working on and allows you to share it with your friends. They can carve the same block using the ‘Enter block number’ function in the Quarry.
Begin by having one player go to the ‘Quarry’ section of the website and follow the above instructions for generating a letter block. Before pressing ‘Begin,’ the initiating player shares the block number with the other players. Each player enters this block number using the ‘Enter block number’ function in the Quarry. This will generate the identical block for each player. Once everyone is ready with the game play screen in front of her, say ‘3-2-1-Go!’ Then everyone clicks ‘Begin’ at the same time and starts sculpting their block.
When the game ends, read your stories aloud to each other. You will be amazed at how different and unique each of the stories is. The letters may be the same, but everyone finds a different David in her block.