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)

I Like Word Games But...

On the recent trip down to the Blue Mountains I played a great many games. I was badly beaten at Maharaja, Mu, Expedition, and more. They were all games I didn't really get into, couldn't concentrate on, and played badly at. We also played a couple of word games - Milleranagrams and Knizia's My Word! In those I played much better... in fact everyone conceded they were playing for second place. I was grateful that I was able redeem myself and prove that I was good at some games, at least, but it's a little disturbing that most word games I play aren't even a close contest. It makes it difficult to get opponents.

Here are some other word games I play and my thoughts on them:

Scrabble - I like playing this, and in the only game I've played recently other than at Scrabble club Mrs CyberKev beat me. The Scrabble club is a source of people who are good at word games, but how many 70 year old ladies will come out for a games meeting?

Milleranagrams - I may own the only copy of this existing in the world. I think it's an Australian thing, and my mum bought it in the 70s. The rules are somewhat vague, having been written by a crazy professor, but you can make enough sense of them to play a decent game. If you've ever played Snatch, it's like that with turns.

Snatch - Scrabblette recently bought a copy of this which we played last night, and that's what got me thinking about word games this time. In games where you steal words from other players, I do that all the time. Thank you Scrabblette for not stabbing me in my sleep.

Man Bites Dog - A game of making newspaper headlines. I thought it desperately needed some house rules to make it interesting, but the kids didn't mind playing it.

Scrabble Card Game - I previously blogged about playing this. It's a decent substitute for Scrabble but I'd like to play it again before I make any definitive statements about it. Scrabblette got badly screwed by the random distribution of the bonus cards.

Lexicon - An anagramming game where you can be screwed by bad hands of cards which evens it up a little. I think Scrabblette won this when we played with the CyberKevs. It moves a bit slow for me - I can tell when there's just not a word to be had, and then I have to wait for my turn.

Pass the Bomb - A quick thinking game where you have to think of a new word following some pattern while passing a bomb around. Whoever's left holding the bomb when it goes off loses a point. It works OK but with a group of good players it's all luck. I gave a copy to my sister for Christmas and we played with the kids which was pretty funny as they made up words and tried to fob the bomb off to the next person.

My Word! - The Knizia game where cards are laid on the table and people call out words made from 3 or more of the cards. When CyberKev was doing the card-laying he went quite fast which made the game fairly chaotic. I don't really like the rule that if you call out a wrong word everyone else gets a card, but I can't see a better alternative.

Wordigo - Wordigo is a strange multiplayer solitaire word game where players compete to lay words along individual tracks. I had a solitaire game which presented some difficulty. I'll have to try it again, I don't remember so much about it. Heck, that was before Christmas that I played that!

Smart Mouth - Smart Mouth comes with a cute little gadget that spits out two letters - one that starts the word and one that ends the word. First person to say a valid word scores. The trouble with this game is that after you play it a few times you know words for the 400-odd combinations it can throw at you, and if you can spout them out in half a second you won't be beaten. The words you need to remember are NAWAB and MEMSAHIB.

Boggle - I feel like I don't play this very well, but the time I played against the kid and his mum they vowed to never play against me again. I have an electronic version in the glovebox of the car but I probably shouldn't play it at traffic lights.

Acronymia (unplayed) - An acronym making game. I haven't even unwrapped it yet so I don't know whether it should be on this list.

My Word (unplayed) - Received in a trade from OzVortex. It looks like Carcassonne with letters instead of towns and roads.

Super Sentence Cube Game (unplayed) - I have a suspicion that this game is totally broken. It contains things that aren't words, and the bits are falling apart. Maybe I should play it with my nephew, who can't read anyway.

WildWords (unplayed) - A Scrabble variant with wilcard tiles and negative points for playing on some spaces. Looks pretty chaotic, I hope it works OK.

Word Tower (unplayed) - I like the look of this - you encode a word as a series of coloured disks and the other players try to find a word that matches. I haven't found anyone else interested in it at all.

Scrabble Cards

Scrabblette has moved into chez nous, and in her boxes of stuff we found a deck of Scrabble Cards. I've seen them at the shops but didn't think to buy them. So I checked out the rules on BGG yesterday and we played last night.

Her first move was PROVIDE for 63 points. Uh oh. BEMATER probably wasn't a word so I was forced to play BEATER for only 44 points with a double word score. I should have played BEAMER for 48, but you do stupid things when you're in love. Anyway, with the help of some double and triple word scores I eventually caught up and passed her. SCRUM with a triple word score for 69 points really helped, as did ENJOYING with all 7 cards and a bonus for playing a blank for 71 points.

Scrabblette, meanwhile, was struggling with category cards that she couldn't fulfill the conditions for. A category card gives you two options - for example, "a word starting with J" or "a four letter word". There seems to be no rule which allows you to discard a category card you don't want to use, which is annoying while your opponent is playing double and triple word scores all the time. At the end of the game we discovered that I'd played ALL 4 of the double word scores and BOTH of the triple word scores. As you'd expect, the result was a glorious victory for me, but I want to play again in a fairer game.