Scarabeo

No, I'm not dead. I've been doing other things. For example, learning Italian. Shortly after we started the Italian For Travellers course, I researched Italian games. I discovered there's an Italian variation on Scrabble called Scarabeo, and I set about finding one. I found a BGG user who was willing to trade away his copy, so in exchange for a game I mail-ordered from Nestor Games, a copy of Scarabeo made its way to Australia on a slow boat. It arrived a few weeks ago, but Scrabblette (soon to be Dr Scrabblette) has been too busy to play, and indeed too busy to study Italian. Luckily, on the weekend Miss Jane was looking for a game, and Miss Jane has been learning Italian as well, so we played.

I have two Italian dictionaries, both of which got a serious workout during the game, but only short time after we started Jane said "We're doing it! We're playing Scrabble in Italian!" The result is shown above. The previous game Miss Jane and I played was Jaipur, in French, so we're really getting quite random.

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Triple Triple!

After 120-something games of Scrabble, I've finally scored a triple-triple! That's where you play one word on two triple word scores. Preferably, it's a bingo as well - mine was. Sadly, it was in a solitaire game where the competition was slightly more forgiving than a real opponent would be. Nevertheless, I'm really on a roll today. Here's the final board:

Words played (bingos coloured pink in honour of Her Highness Melissa, Queen of the Geek):

CORM 16
MOULDIER 72
LISTENER 70
VINYL 15
DOWNY 24
UNFAIRLY 87
BIZ 53
HOST 42
GRADUATE 76
OKAPI 42
OLIVE 15
BARB 10
QUIPS 84
EXO 40
JEWED 48
ZOOT 14
GARE 38
GLACE 15
FATTIEST 150
TUG 4
THEN 21
OM 21
NADA 10
FE 10

That was by far my highest play in a game of Scrabble. My total score was 977 from 24 moves. I guess 1000 is a possibility! Now... to play a triple-triple in a real game. I wonder if Merric Blackman has made his move yet...

AGONY, and other words

I think AGONY is a harsh word to describe the pain in my arm, but OW is certainly accurate, and those were the first two words I played in my Scrabble Cards solitaire games today. Scrabblette has taken the day off work to look after me (because the hospital made me sign a form saying someone would keep an eye on me for 24 hours) but she still has work to do. If only I'd got the hospital to make the form say she had to play games with me...

Anyway, I was playing by my usual solitaire Scrabble rules which are that your score is your average points per turn. I haven't soloed Scrabble Cards before so I didn't have a benchmark to compare to. Anyway, I decided a good strategy would be to use as many bonus cards as I possibly could, as they give you points and then you get another bonus card. I found that the bonus cards then sort of guided the game as the board position does in normal Scrabble.


Anyway, a few moves into the game I found the letters pictured above in my hand. It might not mean much to you, but my friend Bren Caperon died of cancer a few years ago, and I still find myself sometimes wondering what he's up to, and realising that's no longer a valid question. I hope people don't think the same about me in future!

It seems Bren brought me good luck, because I then noticed a bingo waiting for me - 61 points! On the next turn I played ZONKED with a "contains Z" category card for 35 points. I managed to keep the Z card on the table and scored from it for the next 4 turns, including a TWS and a DWS.


Eventually I had to let the Z go, and I scored slowly for a few turns as I couldn't even use my bonus card. (Note that under my rules taking a turn to swap the bonus card would decrease my score, so it's better not to, I think.) However the X came out and I had a lot of fun playing with that - DAG was a DWS on the G for 37 points, and I later played FAST with AX as a cross-word and a "contains X" category card for 33 points.

My final score was 620 points from 26 turns, and I used all of the category cards. The words played were:

AGONY WEEN UG AINE WIN CHAPERON ZONKED ZED LAZY SIZE VIBES BEACH JAR QUOTA BOND SHILL POX DAG MOS BAIT FAST FATTIES MIX CURL AURA VAR.

A couple of hours later I got motivated for another bash, and dealt myself another hand. The start was unspectacular and after 4 moves I was 7 points behind the pace of my previous game. I found myself with AELNTW + blank and thought "there must be a bingo in there!". I pondered for a few minutes - WANTLESS? FAWNLET? LAWNETTE? until I figured out WETLAND.


I'm usually very bad at finding composite bingos like that, as the letters don't follow the patterns of the language so closely. Is there any other word with ETLA in the middle? SHETLAND... but it's almost a composite as well. So I was fairly pleased that I found WETLAND.


I then drew a V which I always find a painful experience, but I was able to play VARIED, and next turn I could make DUSTED next to it. Not great points, but fun to find. When the Z came out in this game I was looking to repeat my success with it from the previous game (I scored it at least 7 times), but my letters weren't helpful - you need Os and As - and after only scoring it twice the Z went away. After 10 turns I was 25 points off the pace.

However the game turned. I played BASHO on turn 16 for 22 points, and then drew the X and beautiful letters to go with it - I had MOXIE and a D as well so I could have made OXIDE. However MOXIE fit better and with the TWS it scored 80 points. Woohoo!


My next bonus card was a DWS and I was able to lay JAKE below MOXIE for 63 points. Woohoo again! BTW BASHO had to stay on the table because the B and the A were both in use - if it had been only one of them then the other letters would have been removed.
My luck continued - I drew a blank and could make PUDDIES for 79 points. Then I drew more good letters and made POLARISE through the A of BASHO for 66 points. Then there was only one card left and I finished the game with 661 points from 21 turns, a much better score than in the previous game. The words I made in this game were:

GLIM COWL CHURN HAVE WETLAND VARIED DUSTED FATTY QUERY GAZED BIZ OAR GENIC FUN ONTIC BASHO MOXIE JAKE PUDDIES POLARISE LA

Back to bitching about my injuries, things I'm looking forward to include:
* alcohol (this evening - but in moderation, as digestion of alcohol and digestion of paracetamol don't happen at the same time)
* finding out how much pain is caused by the injury and how much by the dressing (tomorrow)
* washing my hair (tomorrow)
* typing with all my fingers (don't know)
* sleeping on my right side (don't know)

A Word So Weird It Must Be An Australian Animal

"It's OK! I've overstood! It's a Wordy Rappinghood!"

The other day Scrabblette was waching me play Scrabble on-line and saw me play JABIRU and asked "what's that?" This is the only word ever Scrabblette has not been able to tell me the etymology of. It's a type of stork. That suggested to me that many Scrabble players may not know some types of animals that are native to Australia, so I've compiled a list of some of them. I've checked these against SOWPODS, use them in a TWL game at your peril.

ANEMONE
BILBY
BITTERN
BOOBOOK
BROLGA
BUDGERIGAR
BUDGIE
CASSOWARY
CORELLA
CORVID
COUCAL
CRAKE
CUTTLEBONE
CUTTLEFISH
DRONGO
DUGONG
DUNNART
ECHIDNA
EMU
FROGFISH
FROGMOUTH
GALAH
GALLINULE
GOANNA
GOATFISH
GREBE
GURNARD
HEELER
JABIRU
JACANA
JUMBUCK
KANGAROO
KOALA
MOORHEN
NANNYGAI
NIGHTJAR
NUMBAT
PADEMELON
PARDALOTE
PIPIT
PIPPY
PITTA
PLATYPUS
POTOROO
QUOKKA
QUOLL
ROSELLA
ROUGHY
SKUA
STINGAREE
THYLACINE
WALLABY
WOMBAT
ZEBRAFISH

NANNYGAI's a pretty good one, isn't it? Your opponent is sure to challenge! By the way if anyone knows where my Tom Toom Club CD is, could they please tell me?

One of Those Boring Retrospective Articles

I hate TV at this time of year, when all the stories on the news shows are "let's take a look at what happened throughout the year". I was there, I did see it, and I KNOW you're only showing it because it's cheap television. Stop wasting my time. I will now demonstrate the height of hypocrisy by doing the same thing myself.

Game of the Year

With 59 plays, more than the next four contenders combined, my Game of the Year has to be Scrabble. I enjoy it a lot, and I can play on-line which means my opponents and I don't need to synchronise in time and location. Given that one of my most regular opponents lives in Beijing, that's just as well. I enjoy Scrabble a lot, and now that I know the 2 letter words hope to play a little bit more seriously in 2008.

Highlight of the Year

The gaming highlight of the year has to have been Scrabblette finding the "Connection Games" book for me. It led to an obsession that has had a massive impact on the games I buy and play. It sure would be handy if I had an opponent with a similar obsession, but the mathematical aspects of these games have kept me amused for hours. Not to mention implementing Hex for Facebook.

Best New Game of the Year

I've probably played only about a dozen games published in 2007, so I'm choosing from a small pool here, but the best of them so far is definitely Unspeakable Words. It's nothing deep, but it's easy to teach and fun to play and does reward skill.

Happily Unplayed Games of the Year

At the end of last year I realised there were a few games I was completely over - Ra, Geschenkt and Poison, for starters. I wanted to avoid playing them for a while. Given that I didn't play them at all in 2007, I guess I succeeded. Their banishment is over now, and while I still won't be rushing to play them I may not avoid them as assiduously.

Sadly Unplayed Games of the Year

I know it's a long time since Ozvortex came over for a game of C&C Ancients, but I didn't realise it had been a whole year. I guess a lot of 2007 was occupied by moving house. I also didn't play GIPF, DVONN or PUNCT, which doesn't seem right.

Ambitions

Apart from my ambitions with regards to managing my collection as described in an earlier post, these are the things I want to achieve in 2008:

• Find more opponents for 2 player abstracts so I can start playing the again.
  
• Play more of my capital games, e.g. St Petersburg, Tigris & Euphrates, Domaine.

That is all. See you next year.

Recent Scrabble Scores

Hoo boy have I been playing a lot of Scrabulous recently! I've been on leave and have had enthusiastic opponents. I don't know whether it's because of what I learnt from Joe Edley's book, but I've been making a lot more bingos and some poor opponents have been hit with 2 or 3 a game. In one game I got 3 of them and my opponent got 2. My scores from the last 15 games: 309, 398, 393, 374, 373, 394, 462, 321, 409, 359, 451, 289, 334, 343, 377. That's an average of 372, which is about what I reported in November. I've been working on learning the 3 letter words, but there's lots of weird ones in there. FUB FUD FUG FUM.

Call Me "Deacon Blues"

They've got a name for the winners in the world,
I want a name when I lose.
They call Alabama "The Crimson Tide".
Call me "Deacon Blues".

Scrabblette 368 Friendless 295

Scrabblette 353 Friendless 339

Scrabblette 351 Friendless 343

Scrabblette 369 Friendless 356

Scrabblette 377 Friendless 339

Scrabblette 505 Friendless 301

A Labour of Love

No, this is not another post about Kevin Rudd. This is a post about Facebook.

A few months ago Aldie asked for testers for his Facebook board game app. Of course I joined Facebook to see what the story was. I found a few people that I know there, so I hung around for a couple of days adding friends. Somehow I started playing Scrabulous, and that was when I realised what a great site this really was. I was playing Scrabble against people I didn't see very often (because they lived in London, for example) and with people who never had the time for a proper game (even though they lived in the same house, for example). I' ve played 47 games of Scrabulous so far.

So I realised Facebook was a great site for playing games against friends you just can't get to in real life. And other games, as well as Scrabble. I decided to write my own. To avoid copyright issues, I decided to write Hex.

Of course, I had no idea how to. I didn't know whether Aldie had written his app in MSVC or Java or Flash or what, and I had no idea how it got deployed on Facebook. But that was the fun part. I was pretty sure that I could program it, whatever it was. Besides, I wanted to know about this Web 2.0 thing Yehuda was into.

I did some research and found out that Facebook apps are very clever indeed. You write your application as a web service and Facebook delegates requests to your app on Facebook through to your web server. So you can write your app in whatever you like and you host it on your own machine, so Facebook doesn't care about your database maintenance or CPU or anything. It just cares that your app responds to requests. I had used Apache in the past, so I installed it on my home machine. I also wanted to write my application in Python because Java bores me sometimes, so I installed mod_python (lets you write Apache services in Python) as well. I already had Linux and MySQL running, so I'd finally got myself a complete LAMP stack.

I couldn't even get the test example going! I did everything it told me to do and it just didn't work! It was very frustrating! It turned out I was running Apache 1.3 and reading the Apache 2 documentation. You can see at this stage that I didn't know much about what I was doing.

Then there was the Facebook API. It talked all about authentication (yawn) and making requests to the Facebook server. I really struggled with how that was relevant to me. I googled and found something called minifb.py which was Python code for doing Facebook stuff. All of the Facebook doco refers to PHP which I don't speak. minifb did more authentication stuff, and I still didn't get it. Eventually by following examples I figured out what I was supposed to do, and I loaded a Facebook page which made a request to my web server. A small victory, at last.

I've glossed over a few things here. Firstly, my ISP gives me a dynamic IP address, so whenever that changed I'd have to go to Facebook and reconfigure my app to point to the new address. A mate at work told me about dyndns.org which provides DNS services for exactly my situation, and I figured out that my router supports it. So now whenever the router is restarted it connects to dyndns.org and tells it that friendless.servegame.org is at this new IP address now. It's very cool. I also had to deal with the network security - our router was configured to not allow any requests from the outside to come into our home network. I had to tell it to route requests for the HTTP service through to my desktop. Not that hard to do, but tricky to realise that you have to do it.

OK, so we were at the "one request got through once" stage. Nothing got any easier. Facebook uses HTML, but it extends it with FBML (Facebook Markup Language) which implements all of the cool widgets that you use to invite friends to do stupid stuff. So I needed to learn a little about that. I also needed to figure out how I was going to implement the user interface. JavaScript looked pretty handy, so I learned that as well.

JavaScript really is pretty cool. You can do all sorts of programming on the client side, and with AJAX you can even make calls back to the server from within the web page. Without worrying about the Facebook thing, I coded up some JavaScript to render the board in the web page, figure out which cell the user clicked on, then make an AJAX RPC back to the server to make the move. It took a while, but it was sweet. After I got it going I hooked it into the Facebook code, and Facebook said "JavaScript not allowed". They're afraid you'll hack around with there HTML and corrupt the site experience.

Well that was a wasted week! It was fun, but ultimately got me no closer to having a working game. I experimented with many solutions. I knew that Scrabulous used Flash, but Flash is not free and I wasn't particularly motivated to learn it, so I couldn't copy from them. My goal was to do as much work as possible in the client, but as JavaScript wasn't allowed I couldn't see how to do much at all. I probably could have written a Java applet (I mean, I know I could do it, I just don't know whether Facebook would allow it), but even I understand that users don't want to install Java.

This was all complicated by the fact that I couldn't get Facebook to display my images. In fact, I still can't. Any image included in my app has to come direct from my web server - if it goes through Facebook its gets interpreted as text. Yes I'm setting the content type. I still don't understand that one. I have another app in progress using the Django framework and it does the same thing. So I had to solve the client technology problem and the image serving problem at the same time.

The solution I eventually came up with was to generate the board image on the server side, serve it direct from my own machine, into a HTML form, so when the user clicked on a cell it would send me back the (x,y) coordinates of the click. I could then convert that back to a cell on the server side. Nothing at all happens on the client, but at least it seems to work.


I got the game basically working. The code about detecting wins and so on was EASY compared to all of the technology nonsense. The game requires two real players so there's no AI involved. However them I needed to add some of the bells and whistles, for example, notification to your opponent that you've started a game.

That was when the authentication tarrasque bit me. You see, Facebook has this completely sensible system where your page is treated as a form with lots of hidden fields. Some of those fields, e.g. user id, Facebook session id, and so on, come from Facebook and tell you Facebook stuff. Those fields are digitally signed and you use your application secret to check they're kosher. EXCEPT, if you have a form on your page like I do, it sends some of that stuff twice, and digitally signs it twice. So you have to figure out what is authenticated by what signature. I ended up changing minifb to deal with it, because of course I was the first person to use minifb to receive a form submission and nobody else cared that it didn't work.

So after I figured out authentication I was able to get the session key which allowed me to send notifications to the server. At the moment I send a notification only when a game is started, as if your application sends too many notifications in one day your application gets classified as spam. Given the spamminess of many Facebook applications, the fact that they monitor that is a good thing.

Anyway, it's all sort-of working. I need some users to try it out.

http://apps.facebook.com/hexgame/

Please.

Becoming an Expert

When I first went to Scrabble club last year I was impressed by a couple of things. Firstly, almost all the players were old ladies; but secondly, that the champions were all younger men. Not like gymnastics, of course, you can be considerably older than that to be a Scrabble champion. You can have gametes, for one. You can even have grandchildren. But Brian Cappelletto is 3 years younger than me. Anyway, this is a game where I fit the profile of a champion, and it's a game that I really like. That's encouraging.

Of course, to become any good you need an opponent. With me unable to make Scrabble club regularly, and being single at the time, and being friendless to boot, finding a regular Scrabble opponent seemed unlikely. Times change though, and the wonderful Scrabblette arrived, as did the wonderful scrabulous.com. And indeed, the wonderful Jane started coming along to Critical Mass and she'll always play Scrabble. That (well, mostly Scrabulous on Facebook) has led to Scrabble becoming my most played game of the year, and in fact of all-time. I have several games in progress at any one time, so if there's any game I have the opportunity to practise, it's Scrabble.

Of course I could play against a computer, but I really don't like computer opponents. First of all, they don;t have much of a personality. You can't say "TELERANS! How did you know TELERANS was a word!?" to a computer opponent. Also, often they play way too well (e.g. GF1) and just depress you instead of giving you a good game. CyberKev points out that I like to play humans because humans are fallible. Yeah... you're all just imperfect opponents to me!

Now don't get me wrong... it's not just Scrabble that I desire to be good at. There are many great games I'd like to become an expert at - Hex, Go, Kropki, Zertz, Checkers. I presume those old guys playing Dominos in the Buena Vista Social Club see skill in that game that has so far eluded me. I'd love to one day be an old guy playing the same game over and over, if I can see the beauty of the game and always learn new things about it.

I think with Scrabble I've reached the level where I can see what it is I need to know. That takes a surprisingly long time! Obviously anagramming is an important skill, and although I consider it one of my strengths at the moment I can see I need to be a lot better. There are twenty-odd thousand seven letter anagrams in Scrabble, and I can't find most of them. Add in blanks and a board to play on and I'm a babe in the words.

There's also the ability to deal with bad racks. Scrabble is legendary for its ability to produce never-ending sequences of impossible-to-play racks. Just when you think it couldn't get any worse, you draw another two Us. Experts know the words to deal with those situations. I know ZEX, ZAX, EUOI and JIVE. I hope UBUNTU is a word :-). I have a lot of work to do learning short words containing high point letters, and vowel dumps.

There's also the difficulty of playing with closed boards, i.e. one of those boards where your only options for play are to end a word in C, start one with X, or to make any two letter word with a V in it. I find those situations very very difficult, and need to learn to play them better.

If you have an open board, of course you're looking for a bingo. Good players either make a bingo or play a word which will prepare their rack for a bingo soon. In the recent world final match 7 bingos were scored between the players. That's almost half the tiles in the game being used in 7 turns. And there were only 24 turns in the game. I did notice that the top-left corner of the board was hard to get into, but in general there were enough places to play for the few words the players needed to make. Words like BEZ, LEE and WOW were made as the players adjusted their racks looking for bingos, which they found about every 3.5 moves. OMG.

I may never be as good as those guys. But at least I am good enough to appreciate their skill, and I can see what a huge gulf there is between me and them.

Recent Scrabble Scores

Isn't Scrabble a beautiful game? The bonus tiles drag you to all corners of the board. The better players need space to play longer words which they have because they have a higher letter density in the spaces they have used. It just all fits very nicely. I found some tournament games on-line and have been amazed at the words those guys play. I think I'm about one bingo per game away from being a decent tournament player.

Here are my recent scores on Scrabulous (with W for won and L for lost): 363 (L), 356 (L), 409 (W), 290 (L), 479 (W), 339 (L), 347 (W), 332 (W), 413 (W). That's an average of about 370 points per game, so I've definitely improved my game recently. There was also a face-to-face game where I scored about 408. The two lowest scores (290 and 332) were challenge games against Gerrod. Gerrod likes to challenge my words off the board (bastard) so scores are lower in those games. I think I also get flustered and play worse in a challenge game. Yet I persevere because that's tournament rules and I've got to get used to them.

I guess I should mention I haven't beaten Scrabblette in a one on one game for months :-(. The girl is good.

A Continuous Friendless Metric

CyberKev and I have been discussing the Friendless metric. You see, the problem is that he's got his above zero, which is a great thing... but let us recap for those of you who don't know what a Friendless metric is. The problem with a large games collection is that you spent a lot of money on a lot of games, and some of them don't get played. In fact, many of them don't get played. You, the non-gamer, may be chortling to yourself thinking "hah, I knew he didn't really buy those games to play - he's just a spendthrift / show-off / wanker / (d) all of the above"... but common wisdom is that 50% of board games never get played. Many are bought as gifts for nephews and nieces who never bother to read the rules. So even though I have 50 games I've never played, that's only 14% of my collection, and I'm doing very well.

A lot of boardgamegeeks keep track of when they play what game on boardgamegeek.com. This satisfies a primal geek instinct to gather statistics about ourselves, and will one day provide an anthropologist with awesome data for a Ph.D. thesis on collecting, leisure and obsession. One of the purposes to which I put this data is to answer the question "do I really need all these games?" It's geek angst.

Now if I had only a copy of Scrabble, and I'd played it 173 times, I could safely answer "yes". If I had 10,000 games and had still only played Scrabble, I could safely answer "no" (though collecting games is a totally different matter and I don't address that here). So the point is to compare the games you have to the games you play to provide some measure of how much you're really using all those games. That's what the Friendless metric attempts to do.

To calculate the Friendless metric, make a list of all of your games in descending order of how many times you've played them. Scrabble with 173 plays comes first, Triominos with 0 plays comes last. For each game at the beginning with 10 or more plays, we consider that game to have earned its keep. Even better, having played one game that many times, you're forgiven one at the other end which you haven't played so much. So for playing Scrabble so many times we'll forgive you for never playing Triominos. People who play games tend to accumulate them, so we'll assume that was a gift. Then, we look at how many times you've played the last game remaining on the list... and that's your Friendless metric. The higher the better. Most bggeeks have a value of zero, so I extended the definition to go into negatives. A value of -x tells you that to get to a Friendless metric of 1 you need to play x more of your games that you've never played. Mine has been between -8 and -2 for most of the year, and just today reached 1 for the first time! Woohoo!

Now, as mentioned above, CyberKev reached positive numbers a few months ago. This is a great piece of news - it means that he's utilising his game collection. However, when his Friendless metric reached 3, CyberKev noticed that there was no longer any reward in playing his unplayed games. By playing an unplayed game he moves that game from 0 plays to 1 play... but his Friendless metric is 3, so that game is still one of the ones which is forgiven anyway. In fact, that game has to get to 4 plays before it has any chance of affecting the Friendless metric. And NO WAY is CyberKev going to play Triominos 4 times (of course, he could just get rid of it - that works very nicely). So the problem with the Friendless metric is that once it gets to 1 it fails in one of its primary aims - to encourage you to play all of your games.

What we need then is a continuous Friendless metric - one which rewards all plays, rather than just a few games you've played 9 times and a few games you've played a number of times equal to your Friendless metric. I've been thinking about this since CyberKev explained the problem to me, but just this evening I think I've come up with a nice solution. The design goal is to reward you (i.e. make your number higher) for playing ALL of your games. Also, to reward you for playing those infrequently played games more than for playing the frequently played ones. That may not make much sense at first, but consider that it actually encourages you to dispose of infrequently played games so that your collection more closely resembles what you actually will play - if you're not going to play this game, you can benefit by not even having it! And finally, a minor goal was to reward even plays of frequently played games, just a little bit.

Consideration of the shape of the reward curve I wanted led me to the exponential distribution. Basically there's a big reward for a first play, and smaller rewards for subsequent plays. The distribution has a parameter called lambda which controls how quickly the rewards drop off (and how long they last). I experimented, and it felt right to me to set lambda to 0.3. Don't worry, I'll explain.

Consider it like this. If you play a game 0 times, you get 0% of the possible reward for it. If you play a game an infinite number of times, you get 100% of the possible reward for it. With lambda set at 0.3, if you play a game once you get 26% of the possible reward for it. And as you get more plays you proceed to 45%, 59%, 70%, 78%, 83%, 88%, 91%, 93%, 95%, and so on with diminishing returns for each play. (This is the cumulative distribution function.) Those numbers feel vaguely right to me.

So, for each game I calculate what percentage of the possible reward you've achieved. I then averaged those numbers, and displayed the percentage. But then I realised, in one of the AHA! moments, that I could turn that percentage back into a number of plays, to a number that was like an average number of plays, but wasn't really. So I coded up the inverse of the CDF and the magic numbers started coming out.

My CFM is (currently) 2.45. My average number of plays per game owned is 4.5 Those numbers are comparable. In fact, if I'd played every game in my collection the same number of times, they would be the same. So the difference is the penalty for owning games I don't play.

I have 350 games of which I've never played 51. My other test subject has 198 games, which he has played an average of 11.6 times each, but he has a CFM of 1.18. Why is that? Well, it turns out that the gentleman is a Magic: the Gathering player who plays LOTS and LOTS of Magic. So his mean plays per game is very much distorted by that. Of his 198 games, he hasn't ever played 113 of them. So my collection much more accurately matches what I play.

I like this number. It feels beautiful. Comments?

BTW, the stats with these numbers in are hosted at http://friendless.servegame.org/stats/. More on that tomorrow.

Playing Super Scrabble With Myself

With Scrabblette allegedly studying this evening, I set myself a project of playing Super Scrabble Solitaire. Super Scrabble is just like normal Scrabble with but a 21x21 board and 200 tiles, so roughly twice as large. Also, the tile mix is slightly friendlier - proportionally there are fewer Js and Vs and more Ts and Ss.

I thought about the assessment rules on the train on the way home. It would be possible to attempt to set myself up for a really big score through careful planning... get the Q on the quadruple letter score, and the Z on the triple word score, and so on, but that would be really boring and not at all like the real game. So to compare games of solitaire Super Scrabble I will compare average points per turn. Hence I'm usually motivated to play the best word for any move. I did find myself not wanting to waste spaces that I thought I could get a good score on. The 7 spaces where BENEFITS ended up was an example - I knew it would be easy to play a 7 letter bingo ending in S on a triple word score, so I left the spot available until I had one.

The game lasted 2.5 hours and I found myself tiring about halfway through. The board is so big and there are so many places to play (though not as many as you'd expect) that you get worn out trying to consider all of the possibilities. Sometimes I just played a word because I liked the word and wanted to remember it later - BIOTA, VATIC, ZORI, ARIEL. And sometimes I played a poor word to get rid of some letters to try to get something decent on my rack.

Here are the words and what they scored:

DICING 22
SPLINTS 36
JILT 27
MOAN 22
JEANS 24
TORNADO 66 (bingo #1)
VANE 38 - if there had been an L I could have played HEAVENLY!
YAWNED 30
AXON 40
PACE 44
COW 21
BENEFITS 77 (bingo #2)
DOCTOR 27
FUSED 23
GRUBS 38
BIOTA 24
CUE 10
SQUAT 77
PIXIES 69
DAMN 37
MOW 32
UNSATING 58 (bingo #3)
WONTS 40
WHY 30
ZEE 41
VATIC 20
HULK 38
PORGY 46
DIMMER 42
WEDGE 20
QI 21
EVER 16
KNEEL 18
ZITS 69
MANY 42
USHER 51
FIB 33
LARCH 44
ZORI 57
RAJ 28
IDLE 15
OVER 20
FORGED 39
HEAD 49
RAFTER 36
TUP 16
ARIEL 20
OFTEN 20
KNOT 28
TOE 17
ZIT 12
PI 6

for a total score of 1776 in 52 turns = 34.2 points per turn.

My impression is that rack management is more important in this game than in the small game. If you think 3 Us on your rack is bad, consider the possibility of having 7! Also, although scores were slightly higher than the original game, they weren't dramatically so. The quadruple letter tiles and quadruple word tiles are way out in the boondocks, and a word like WONTS on a DWS and QLS is worth 40, when in the original if you got it on a DWS and a TLS it would still be worth 32. If I average about 340 points per game, and this counts as 4 games, then that's about 30% higher. High yes, but not silly.

Anyway, this game was hard work. I allow myself to look in the dictionary (because I'm here to learn, not to compete fairly) and 2.5 hours of anagramming, considering possibilities and looking up words that don't exist (e.g. BIOTECH and FUNCTOR) sucks the energy out of you. That's why I have to go to bed now.

By the way, here is a photo of my niece, just because she's cute.

Am I Getting Any Better at Scrabble?

I've been playing Scrabble on-line using the Scrabulous Facebook application, and Scrabble will become my most-played game for the year. I'd like to think I'm playing better even though I'm regularly losing to Scrabblette and Ashfallen, who are both very fine players. My scores for completed 2 player games on Facebook are: 382, 295, 304, 360, 389, 339, 336, 316, 289, 343 which is an average of 335.

My scores at Scrabble club last year were: 353, 367, 309, 435, 344, 381, 299, 358, 316, 236 which is an average of 340. Well that's a bit depressing. I'm finding fewer bingos at the moment, and that makes a big difference to scores. I hope it's just a run of bad luck.

Postscript: in the 10 Scrabble club games I made 8 bingos. In the 10 Scrabulous games I made 6 bingos. That more than accounts for the difference in scores.

Three New Word Games

Scrabblette and the kid and I, and my sister and her family, went to beautiful Bundaberg on the weekend to visit my baby sister and her baby daughter. And Pete. PETE HUNGRY! PETE EAT BABY! Here's a gratuitous baby photo because she's so cute:

As there were a lot of us (7 and a dog) we rented a house for the weekend, right on the beach. So close to the beach that Miss Swimming Fanatic heard the ocean as soon as we arrived (at 11pm) and begged at the door to be allowed out to go for a swim. There was a lot of this:

DOG SMELL LIKE FISH! PETE EAT FISH! By my count, I took the dog to the beach 4 times, Scrabblette took her at least twice, and Uncle Scott took her once or twice. And she still spent most of her time sulking about not being allowed to go out.

Anyway, on with the story. The games I managed to play over the weekend were all word games and all were new to me.

Wordrop

Wordrop is a simple game for 2 or 4 players, though I really don't understand why it wouldn't work for 3 or even 5. You have a plastic frame like a Connect 4 frame and you drop letters into it - one letter per turn. You score one point per letter for every word you make that includes that letter, reckoned upside down, inside out, backwards, forwards, any which way. With a well-placed I it's easy to make 9 points with IF, IT, ITS and ID, so we figured it was primarily a game of making 2 letter words.
When all 100 letter tiles are placed the game ends and highest score wins. This game was a bit unusual in that there is no randomness - players get to choose any tile they want. However I doubt two games will be the same.

I think Wordrop is a great game for learning two letter words for Scrabble, but otherwise not very interesting. In my game I beat my sister by about as many points as she forgot to score.

Pick Two!

Pick Two is a crossword game. There are 240 letter tiles. Each player (from 2 to 6) starts by drawing 8 and arranging them into a crossword using "valid" words. When someone has completed their crossword they say "pick two" and everybody takes 2 tiles and has to rearrange their crossword to fit them in. When you've run out of tiles to draw everybody scores points (and that's bad) for the letters they haven't placed into their crossword yet.

I liked this game because it was very tense. I was playing against Scrabblette using only 180 tiles. She started off very fast and called "pick two" quite a few times while I was stuck with stupid Vs. She also got a lot more wilds than I did! I got my act together and caught up as she drew some Qs. We only played 1 round of a recommended 5.

Scrabblette didn't like it so much because there was no player interaction. I liked it because I totally trust Scrabblette to make legal words and I felt under pressure for the whole round (maybe 10 minutes?). When a game gets me pumped like that I enjoy it. Scrabblette suggests a cooperative variant may suit her better, whereas I'd like to try it with 6 players.

Word Jam
The final game we played for the weekend was Word Jam. PETE wasn't around to EAT GAME, and Trixi doesn't know any words yet so she didn't play either. However everyone else did, from the 6 year old to the venerable Scrabblette.

In Word Jam you deal 5 consonant cards. One of those consonants is worth 1 point, one is worth 2, two are worth 3, and one is banned. There's also a random category that you must make words from, like Scattergories. In the picture W is worth 1, H worth 2, G worth 3, L worth 3, and S is banned. The category was "singers". I thought of the Wiggles, which contains an S and so is not allowed. "George Thorogood" would have been worth 11 points (3 Gs, 1 H) and would have won me the game if I'd thought of it then! "George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers" would be worth 0 points because of the S.

Anyway, each round new consonants and a new category are dealt. Players then think of a word until someone thinks they have a good one and says "Open Sesame!". That player then becomes Ali Baba. The other players then choose to side with either Ali Baba or the thieves. Players then have 20 seconds to think of a better word. If one of the thief players can give a better word he becomes Head Thief. If Ali Baba had the best word, he gets some points and the players who sided with him get fewer. If the Head Thief beat Ali Baba, then he and the other thieves get some points. As the game proceeds the points awarded become higher. After 8 rounds whoever has the most points wins.

I didn't go for this game particularly, as the Scattergories thing doesn't attract me at all. On the other hand, even the 6 year old was able to play a creditable game, and that's got to be good for a word game. In fact, in the last round only non-gamer-elder-niece and 6yo-gamer-nephew scored any points at all. Sister won this game fairly comfortably. My strategy was to always bet on Scrabblette finding a better word, but it appears this sort of game is not her forte either and we went down together.

Not long after we had to start the long long drive home, only stopping in to visit my dad for Father's Day. PETE DRINK ALONE. YEAH WITH NOBODY ELSE.

Got My Butt Handed To Me

Another game of Scrabble against Scrabblette at scrabulous.com. A glorious victory to her - 368 to 295 using Australian scoring rules. My best word (and only bingo) was BEETING which I'm not very proud of because it's only in the dictionary and we can't find out what it means. I had a chance to play TIDALLY but couldn't figure out where to put it and had to play DELAY instead. There weren't many turns in this game - about 11 each. Scrabblette keeps making long words and using up all the letters. I got stuck with loads of vowels and struggled badly in the beginning, which is how I ended up making RIB and ARIA. There's always next time...

The Girl Is Good

Friendless vs Scrabblette playing via Scrabulous on facebook.com. A narrow victory - 381 to 377. Friendless got 3 bingos to Scrabblette's 1, but Scrabblette's lowest scoring play for the game was 21 points. This is one of the tensest and toughest games I've played.

More New Games

My house is currently flooded with new games after my pusher from alternativegames.com.au visited Critical Mass last night. I bought Bridges of Shangri-La and Tikal from him. We're also still working through the pile that arrived from America. CyberKev (whom this blog is NOT about) also recently returned from America with a pile of new games. Everywhere you turn you trip over them. Anyway, here are the new ones I've got to play since the last update.

Gheos: I played this with Scrabblette and it was chaotic and vicious. Oh hang, it's me that was vicious, but the game was chaotic. If you (or your opponents) don't like "taking stuff off" games, stay away from this one. I'll need to play some more before I find a suitable audience for this one.

That's Life (Verflixxt!): CyberKev taught this at Critical Mass, and I'd just like to say "MEH". In capitals. It's a very dry game which could be analytical if I cared enough, but the die adds enough randomness that I couldn't be bothered. And what is the theme, anyway? Didn't interest me at all and I couldn't wait for it to finish.

Qwirkle: CyberKev also taught this at Critical Mass, and it was much much better than That's Life. It's best described as Scrabble without the letters which sounds stupid but when you play it you realise it's true. It has colours and shapes instead - sort of like Ingenious. As Scrabblette enjoys both Scrabble and Ingenious I suggested she'd like it and the generous and experienced CyberKev loaned it to me. She played it against the kid this morning and said she liked it a lot. Good news! I like it a lot. I wonder though if I've already seen the depths of the game. I expect it will be a solid 8 for me.

Fiji: We dragged Fiji off the pile of new toys this evening and gave it a run. It's a very very chaotic auction game which reminded me of Fist of Dragonstones and Nobody But Us Chickens. It's probably too chaotic to take it seriously, but it's cute.

Alexandros: After the kid flogged us at Fiji, Scrabblette and I banished him and played Alexandros. This is a dry almost abstract which is very much Scrabblette's style. It reminded me of Gheos in that there was "taking stuff off people", but it was nowhere near as chaotic. Scrabblette got a good lead and I found myself having to learn new dirty tricks to catch up. For example, I sent Alexander halfway across Asia Minor to excise a small piece of land from her territory. Sadly, Scrabblette had learnt from her experience at Gheos, and was very good at taking stuff off me. It was a very close game, but she won 103 to 99. I like Alexandros a lot as well.

Notable Games Played Recently

I've been quiet on the blogging front - I think it's because I've been reading a lot of D&D stuff. The party finished their latest adventure and I had to get the next one ready. Also the (first) big box of toys arrived from America and I've been reading the module I bought (Red Hand of Doom). AND I bought the Magic Item Compendium and I've been reading through that for campaign inspiration.

Anway, I have been playing some games.

13 Deadend Drive - I took this over to the nephew and niece and played with them. I just wanna say that I totally kicked their butts... Of the 12 characters in the game, all the other 9 died and I was left with the last three. I didn't realise that the game should end then and we kept playing until one was left alive. A notable event was the chant of "Kill the Cat! Kill the Cat!"

Monsters Menace America - After watching the movie Mars Attacks! the kid and I pulled out MMA to show Scrabblette. She didn't like it at all but the kid and I had a big showdown which I only just won.

Classic Waterworks - Let me totally can this game: Tom Vasel rates it a 2 and comments "I just don't like it". It comes with two decks of cards which you shuffle together, but the cards were cut at different sizes! I've never seen anything so shonky. And it was boring.

TransAmerica - Just like its cousin TransEuropa. The red and orange are a bit difficult to tell apart.

BuyWord - a decent game but maybe too driven by luck. It's different from Scrabble in that you're much more motivated to make long words. Scrabblette managed to beat me!

Ratings on BoardGameGeek

There's an awesome article by Joe Grundy over at BGG about the accuracy, interpretation and resilience of the game rating system. By coincidence I went through and rerated some of my less favourite games yesterday after thinking through what those ratings really mean. The BGG ratings are given minutely short descriptions by Aldie which causes problems - 6 means "will play sporadically if in the right mood" and 5 means "slightly boring". I find many games slightly boring but struggle to think of games which I'll play if I'm in the right mood, so I would tend to give 5s rather than 6s. In an ideal world the sum of all BGG ratings would approximate a bell curve, but if everybody liked the 5 description better than the 6 description, as I do, then the bell curve would be warped. In theory, Aldie's descriptions can change the shape of the curve :-).

Consequently I have my own interpretations for the BGG ratings, and I admit that my interpretations aren't guaranteed to produce a bell curve either. But they're close enough for me.

10: Always want to play this and expect it will never change - "NEVER" is a long time, so the only game I can confidently rate a 10 is Scrabble, because it's been 30 years or so. I rate a few other games a 10 because I'm there must be some others, but they might change.

9: Awesome game and I'm always excited to play it. This is about the same as what Aldie says.

8: Very good game. I like to play. An 8 is my default rating for a game that I liked after 1 play. After I've tested the game a couple of times, if I really like it, it might go up to a 9.

7: Good game, usually willing to play. If I play a game and it's decent but I'm not really excited about it, I will initially rate it a 7. If I keep playing it and discover I don't like it, it will fall, but it might climb as well.

6: Games that are just alright. For example, Carcassonne holds some attraction for me, but it's not very interesting.

5: Games that I don't care for but I might one day want to play them. Louis XIV and El Grande are here because although I really dislike area majorities I can see that it's a game mechanic which makes sense.

4: Games that I wouldn't care if they vanished off the face of the Earth, but I might play them one day anyway. I dislike them but I might want to give them another chance or can see some little value in them. Power Grid is in here.

3: I would actively argue against playing this game or even outright refuse. This is where I rate real games that I really really hate. For example, Australia, Andromeda, Railway Rivals. Don't get me started.

2: Yes it's a game, but it's no fun. A game which is so little fun that I won't ever play it again earns a 2.

1: This does not count as a game because I cannot imagine having any fun with it. Very few games are technically broken, though some which are such as Betrayal at House on the Hill are still fun anyway, so I use the 1 rating for games which couldn't possibly be any fun.

Crocodile Tears

Never, ever, give Scrabblette Jagermeister after 9pm. Particularly if you've just soundly flogged her at Cleopatra and the Society of Architects and she's in one of those bouncy, dangerously physical moods. With the kid to cheer her on, and armed with an obelisk, she can be dangerous.

Anyway... I got home this evening and Cleopatra was on the coffee table. Not the actual gorgeous Queen of the Nile, the game. Which is fortunate because she's been dead a long time. Scrabblette thought it looked interesting and had taken it out to read the rules. As she likes abstracts and word games, a Days of Wonder title was maybe not really her style, but as the kid can play it we decided to give it a go. Scrabblette learns much better by reading than by listening so she quickly read the rules while I organised the bits. There's a lot of bits in this game.

I explained to Scrabblette about the tricks you can do with the mosaic and the scribe, and sure enough that's what she did - she used the scribe to build a very nice sanctuary. I myself built two very nice sanctuaries but I had to buy two mosaic tiles at a time to do it - very nice combos which earned me more than 15 talents each while giving me a net decrease in corruption. The kid was playing totally wild as always and was looking like he would earn the most corruption easily. He understands the rules of games, but almost always chooses a really bad strategy.

In this case his really bad strategy got him eaten by crocodiles. At least it wasn't me. He would have had 50 talents, compared to Scrabblette's 51 and my 70. Scrabblette then threatened to string up a rope between the obelisks and hang me from it. In fact, Scrabblette was driven to tears by my habit of merciless wins, but they were only crocodile tears.

Boom boom.

BTW, if you notice that the quality of writing of this blog changes, it may be the case that Scrabblette and the kid and my dog have quietly murdered me and continue to post so as to not arouse suspicions. If I stop being faintly amusing and slightly sarcastic, look for these other signs:

• Extraordinarily good writing, enormous vocabulary and hyperlinks to The New Yorker - Scrabblette is writing my blog.
• Extremely bad spelling, smilies and hyperlinks to MMORPGs - the kid is writing my blog.
• Extremely bad breath, smelly tennis balls and hair everywhere - my dog is writing my blog.

In other news, when I post a story about my mother dying, it's not a joke. She's extremely ill with Lou Gehrig's disease which you do not recover from. I can't say she made me a gamer, but she made me a reader and I still remember the first time I beat her at Scrabble. She is at the stage in the disease where the paralysis of the throat could cause her to suffocate any day. But for the rest of us, life goes on.

To Scrabblette's family and friends who read this blog - has she always had a tendency towards violence? She is alive and well and just because she's not writing to you doesn't mean I have her tied up in the bed room. Though I might, at times. She is well looked after and well loved by all of us here. She gives us Schmackos every day and we lick her fingers to thank her.