Time begins upon clicking "OK" on the "New User" dialogue box. Immediately after doing this, the opening cutscene will being playing, and in order to skip it you need to click on another dialogue box option. In order to easily skip this, simply position your cursor underneath the end of the arm of Lex's glasses after hitting "OK", which is at the same location as where the dialogue box will be so you can spam-click until the cutscene is skipped.
1.1 is the first level, and always begins in the same way every time. First, there is some dialogue between Lex and Cassandra that needs to be clicked through. After that, you spell PLAY, defeating the Trojan Spearman and beginning more dialogue. This dialogue will also need to be clicked through, but by pressing [space] to "pause", this will cause Lex to being moving to the next enemy while the dialogue continues, allowing around 1 to 2 seconds to be saved very easily. This also has the interesting effect of making the Trojan Warrior (the second enemy) grunt twice if you allow Lex to reach him without skipping all of Cassandra's lines.
Because the starting rack in 1.1 is always the same, this will mean that the rack you have against the Trojan Warrior will always be very similar. In fact, it will look as below, with the blank tiles being any vowel or Y (at least one A is guaranteed to drop).
There are two way to proceed with the Trojan Warrior and subsequent War Hound. The first, more established way, is to play JAUNTED (which has an EL of 7.75, so deals 2.75 BH of damage) and then freestyle on the War Hound using the two F's that are left over. Any word with at least 8.5 EL will one-shot the War Hound, so something like an 8-letter word that uses both F's will work. For almost the entire game, the 8-letter word will be a workhorse, since they are decently long, deal an adequate amount of damage in each stage, and grant sapphire gems.
This method works well, but leaves open the possiblity of getting an unlucky drop of vowels after the Spearman (say, UUY) and being forced to simply deal with a suboptimal rack, which may not have any obvious words to play against the War Hound at all.
The second way is to leverage that only vowels can be dropped after PLAY combined with the fact that the rack is always the same, save for those three unknown vowels. Therefore, a small table of possible plays can be created to guarantee playable words for both the Trojan Warrior and the upcoming War Hound, and be able to curate the rack slightly depending on what gets dropped.
| AA? | E?? | I?? | O?? | U?? | Y?? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ADJUST | ADJURE | ADJUST | ADJOIN | ADJUST | SNIFFY |
| AFFAIRES | STIFFENS | SNIFFIER | STUFFERS | SNUFFIER | READJUST |
The topmost row indicates what letters get dropped after PLAY in addition to the guaranteed A drop, the second row tells you what to play against the Trojan Warrior, and the bottommost row tells you what to play against the War Hound. Note that multiple options may be possible. For example, getting EIU after PLAY gives the option of playing the E, I, or U columns. This will most likely be the U, since it is the most difficult vowel to use out of those three options.
It is handy to have a general knowledge of the letter bonuses against the Trojan Captain, since he can be killed by any word having an EL of 8.5 or greater. In practice, this means he is killed by:
Keep in mind that one-shotting every enemy is not required for good speedrun times, especially for players just beginning to run Bookworm.
Alexander is similar, except that he is weaker, being killed by words with EL's of 6.5 or greater. He dies to:
After killing Alexander, you can skip the 5-second boss introduction by clicking the "Menu" button, going to the main menu and then returning to the adventure. This is done in almost every level and is called a menu skip. In order to properly menu skip, you need to wait for the grave to come up after you defeat Alexander. Otherwise, instead of being brought to Polydamas, you will instead be sent back to Alexander (back from the dead!) and will have to replay your last word and menu skip again. This kind of menu skip will be done before almost every stage's boss (Hydra, Sphinx, and Codex are survival battles and can't be skipped this way).
An important note on menu skipping is that once gems are unlocked, if you overkill an enemy, there will be a short dead-period where you won't be able to open the menu even after the grave comes up. It seems to depend slightly on the type of gem you recieve from the overkill, but it isn't worth not overkilling just to save slightly on a menu skip, so you just need to spam-click the menu button if that happens. Again, this only happens once you have gems.
Polydamas has exactly the same requirements to one-shot as the Trojan Captain does. The only difference here is that, once you defeat him, you will need to menu skip again in order to avoid a lot of dialogue. This menu skip will place you in the chapter selection screen going into 1.2.
1.2 resets the rack again with a predetermined one, so there is a meta way to one-shot the first two enemies. The rack looks like this:
The first word against the Angry Mountain Goat will be PANZERS [PANZER: (n) a World War II German battle tank], and immediately after that the word played against the Angry Ewe will be FUSTIAN [FUSTIAN: a kind course twilled cotton used in menswear]. This will leave the letters LY for the Cyclops Herder, which will aid in one-shotting him as well.
The Cyclops Herder has 4 hearts, so requires a word of at least 9.5 EL to one-shot. However, since Lex now has the Bow of Zyx, all X's, Y's, and Z's now add 1.5 additional letters to the EL each. Essentially, this means that he can be one-shot by:
However, it is not always easy to see a word that will one-shot the Cyclops Herder, so he can also easily be two-shot.
After killing the Cyclops Herder, menu skip again in order to skip some dialogue with Cassandra.
The Angry Ram has exactly the same requirements to one-shot as the Trojan Captain and Polydamas, but sometimes will need to be two-shot anyway since suboptimal letters can accumulate in the rack. As for the Cyclops Warrior, he will almost always be two-shot (to one-shot him requries a word with at least 10.5 EL). After defeating him, menu skip again to get to Polyphemus.
Polyphemus is nigh-impossible to one-shot, and even very experienced players can't always two-shot him. Usually, the best way to kill him is with two 8.5+ EL words, although three-shots with slightly shorter words is not uncommon. No matter how you kill him, menu skip once his grave appears. Polyphemus has a long death animation, so try not to menu skip too early.
1.3 is first stage where the rack doesn't get reset at the beginning of it, so you can have just about any combination of letters upon entering the chapter. Combined with the fact that you can't scramble yet means that rack management and leave are very important. Making sure that you always have good enough letters to be able to take out enemies quickly, combined with being one of the longest chapters, is how 1.3 is maybe the most skill-testing chapter in the game.
The first three enemies can be two-shot by an 8.5+ EL word and a 7.5+ EL word, after which they can all be two-shot by two 8.5+ EL words (provided those enemies don't regenerate any health).
Again, there will be a menu skip after Scylla to skip the boss intro, and another menu skip after Charybdis to skip more dialogue.
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