Might I Have a Word?

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve become sort-of addicted to Words With Friends. I say sort-of, because despite the fact that I have eleven games going, with people from almost every facet of my life*, I think it’s a pretty healthy addiction.

When I was a kid, we had Family Game night, once every few weeks (and after dinner on major holidays). Often it was either Trivial Pursuit or Uno, but every once in a while it’d be Scrabble. Looking back, our games probably weren’t high scoring ones; I think we all wanted to put down a “good” word more than we wanted to maximize our points. I know that, for me, it was all about showing off my vocabulary. Winning was a happy accident and fifteen point words were the norm. It’s only now, almost twenty years later, that I realize that other people (read: everyone else who plays the game) are actually playing to win and the best way to do that is to get the most points for each word they put down. Yeah, I know, this seems elementary, but I never put the two things together until CawfeeMate, Breen Lantern and Magenta Sequins started laying down forty and fifty point words; doubling or tripling my score and beating me by one hundred and fifty points or more. CawfeeMate was nice enough to explain to me that while DJIN is a fun word, unless it’s on a double or triple word multiplier, it’s not worth putting on the board.

So, I learned strategy:

1. always save your S’s
2. build off the beginning or end of another word to get double the points
3.  sometimes it’s better to put down a 3 point word on this turn and let your opponent open up the path to the double word or triple letter multiplier
4.  if you have to swap out letters, it’s not worth swapping less than 5 (see #1)
5. get rid of Qs, Js, Xs and Zs as soon as you can

I also learned how frustrating electronic scrabble is:

1. QI, JO and XI have to be the most frustrating two letter words on the planet; almost nobody knows what they mean, but everyone uses them to unload those pesky letters that are otherwise impossible to use later in the game.
2. The “random distribution” of letters is frequently debatable; I just went through a two week drought where, in almost every game I was playing, I never had fewer that either five vowels or five consonants and at least two sets of duped letters
3. there are no two letter words that start with either the C or V
4. I have no idea what dictionary the game uses, but I’d love to know how it defines words like JANE, TURFY, and RIAL.
5. Some people cheat using other iPhone apps; those people never get a rematch.

All in all, though, I’m loving this game. I like being able to chat with people I don’t get to interact with, otherwise; it’s also makes a nice diversion from knitting straight through my daily commute to and from work and from work itself (where i can't knit). It’s also nice to know that even though certain players continue to kick my ass with 75 point words I’ve never seen, I can occasionally beat them (even if it is only one game out of every ten we play).

send me an invite, but be warned: now that i've got a strategy i'm a little harder to beat...until i get stuck with three I's  a Q, Z, J & X again...
*High School classmates, former co-workers from my 1st Mall Job, current co-workers, Blog buddies, Facebook Friends, actual friends, and even friends & co-workers of CawfeeMate