I have played 4 games in the past 4 days with my roommate, B., and I've lost every one. (Three games in a row he was able to place all 7 of his tiles down at once. Curses!) Tonight I lost by 4 points -- well, technically I tied, but then my two remaining points had to be subtracted from my score and added to his. I am determined to beat him by July 22. He is the only person in my whole Scrabble career I have never beaten. The other night he got a 91-point word -- I have never come close to that! And that's not even his record, which is 150-something. I think my record is 55. Argh! He won tonight's game by banking (correctly) that the word "li" was in the Scrabble dictionary. (It is; it means "a Chinese unit of measure." WhatEVER.) He also wears me down because he is much more patient than I am. (Note to others: never play Scrabble with anyone much more patient than you.) Last night our game lasted for two hours, and, as we were having an energy fast, most of that was played in the dark by candlelight. And I have a travel-sized game, so finding the tiles that randomly pop out of the squares onto the dark rug took *minutes*. I thought I'd beat him today because he gave blood this afternoon, and I was hoping he'd be in a weakened state. Wrong! It took me years to get good, point-wise, because it's more satisfying to place a really cool word than a high-point word. (It hurt a little to place "sure" and create words off the S and U, rather than place "surety" somewhere else, which I really wanted to do because it's in Yeats' poem "The Two Trees": "the surety of its hidden root." But "sure" was worth more with those two extra words, dang it!) B. has taught me to go after the spots where you can make 2 or three words at once -- I never played like that before this year. My secret coup this afternoon was convincing him that "raized" is a word -- it's not; it's spelled "razed." That came back to bite me when I could have made "unraized," for a double word score and 32 points, but then he would have challenged me and discovered that I had tricked him. I do have a larger vocabulary, and I can bluff with confidence, so that's where my edge lies. A few years ago, my night was made when the 7 tiles in my tray spelled "soylent," as in "Soylent Green," with Charleston Heston. I took a picture of that tray, like the dork that I am, and it's on my bulletin board. I know there are a few Scrabble players here. Any stories? What tricks have you learned? Any words you use solely in the game? Do you know of any words that end in J?

taj raj

http://www.cyberonic.com/~bigdoggy/lists.html and yes, the multiple word plays are big. and easy once you start looking for them.

when i used to play scrabble online here, i did use a similar list of words for suggestions. but i wouldn't use the list to cheat. i studied the lists and then i'd use the words i recalled from the lists. it seemed too much like cheating to pull out some word that i had no prior knowledge of. i mean, for crying out loud, some of those words are so obscure that only scrabble players know them. i really tried to be honest about it when it would have been so easy to just have another browser open to these kinds of word lists and basically cheat. i think i had the highest score on mark's scrabble games. like 456 or something. yay me. (i got lucky) ask nelly for scrabble tips. she's a black belt scrabble player.

i have said this before, but mark taught me how to kick ass in scrabble no one will play with me anymore sad

i can't get in to scrabble. cat sent me the link, i tried logging in. something failed. my grandmother taught me how to play scrabble when i was very young. she loved to teach me word games, and we played boggle before i was old enough to grasp scrabble. she always beat me. getting beat in scrabble is the best way to learn how to play well, and learn new cheat words - words that technically are words, but you'd never use in real life.

sarah: email me. cat might have sent you the old link. i heart scrabble. i'm trying to memorize the two letter word list. i feel myself constantly improving when i play with more talented people, constantly striving to make it a better and more fun game. i want to memorize the q words without a u next, because the q always fucks me up. i want to go to vermont this fall.

I can't get into scrabble any more either. It tells me that my password is no good anymore. I went through withdrawal for a while, but now I'm mostly over it. My favorite Q without a U word is qat, because you tend to have those letters altogether for some reason.

Thanks for that list, Dave. And I just learned about "haj" and "gannouj," as in "baba gannouj". For U-less Q words, there's also qi, which is the Chinese word for life-force. Which reminds me. I thought foreign words were forbidden, and yet the Scrabble dictionary has all sorts of crazy foreign words that you'd never use as an English speaker. (I thought the only foreign words allowed were the ones like "quo" and "fajita" -- things an average English-speaker would know, not words like "mynheer," which is the Dutch word for a man. Look for it; it's in the Scrabble dictionary.) What's up with that? Boggle rocks my world. Any game (well, mental, verbally-oriented game) that has it stacked so that the better you do, the worse the others do is NIRVANA for me. You can be so aggressive and vicious and yet remain civilized and cerebral. It's like the verbal equivalent of Ultimate Fighting Championship. But whenever I play Boggle online (http://weboggle.shackworks.com/), I'm horrible, so maybe I just play with crappy players in real life. After I lost that Scrabble game on Friday, one of my roommates offered to play me so I could feel better, but...it's just no fun unless you really have to fight for it, you know? On Friday, the game was so close that my heart was racing and my cheeks were burning after I laid down a few of those words (like "axel," using the triple word score tile, and I made "feel" off of "fee" with the L in "axel," to boot). Fight-or-flight syndrome was in full effect. What's this link to the online Scrabble game?

platypus helped me get back on scrabble. so if anyone wants to play a game with me...

Am I allowed to play?

Help us! (me and spidey)

it is so confusing. the links don't work right. you have to sort of cut and paste the link, then substitute your username and password. i don't know. platy can help you.

Yay! Sarah, I finally figured that out, and then you came and helped me. Then, I joined yours and Trebonius' game. Bring it.

I lost by 110 points last night. The highlight was being able to place "arbiters" off of "biter." The lowlight was cheating and discovering I could make "ras," "ama," and "sax" all in one go, for 24 points, only I knew I'd be called out for cheating because how could I know "ras" is a Persian officer and "ama" is "an Oriental nurse"?

Also, this is a great way to kill time.

but now you know, so it won't be cheating next time.

I just made "jurer" and "wastee" in one go. Too bad neither of them are words. I got too excited and prematurely scrabbled.

Right! I could have made "lozenges" if I had had an L, O, and G. I hate the -or vs. -er problem, TBone. I feel your pain. So many insane words are in that dictionary you almost feel like putting whatever the hell you want down and crossing your fingers.

Ok... how do I get back involved in sorabji's scrabble? Lost the link when my old PC died. I remember my highest point score for a word was 149, although right now the actual word escapes me. I wonder if my account is still there.

btw, lately i have been really good about keeping up with my one active scrabble game w/ platypus. there's a new game i created in january and nobody has joined, so if anyone would like to join me for some scrabble, please do.

It's true, she's kicking my ass at at, too.

someone remind me how to scrabble, please! i promise to never cheat again :)

Speaking of which: ATTENTION SPIDER, JIM, AND TBONE- GET ON THE SCRABBLE STICK!

Heh. It's my turn, isn't it? BUT AGATHAAAAAAA, I have the crappiest letters! Fine.

Your letters aren't going to change if you ignore them long enough. I know, because I've tried that before.

I went. :) Now it's Jim's turn!

you hate me, don't you

I actually don't have the site that you sign up at. I think I got it from Sarah? I don't hate you, I love you!

i love you. you know i do. i'll see if i can find the sign-up page and i'll email you. xxoo

thank you darlings! oh my! sarah-baby! i am agog! *squish*

now everything i try and everything i click says "not found" any ideas what i'm doing wrong?

hah! anyone want to play?

Yeah, but you're playing with yourself. Join the new game I started.

that red and white "bingo" message you get when you use all your letter crashes my browser. firefox.

oh, and heather, i created a game too, which you can join. the one you created, like platy said... you joined it twice, which means you'd have to play 2 turns.

It used to crash mine until I updated to a more recent build...that might be your issue too, Sarah.

well now i've *really* done it. i got another bingo (before i had a chance to write a response to your awesome/crazy story too...) that covers 2 double word scores - and now i can't access our game at all. i've tried restarting my computer and everything just freezes up when i try to access our game. but i can access my other games just fine. dumb bingo.

Yeah, that was an intense bingo. I checked up on the game and was like "what?! AGAIN!?" The word was so apt for the story, too.

Speaking of Scrabble...TBone...seriously. You're holding up the fun.

i can't see platy's game i joined sarah's i can't see anything else, if it in fact exists

heather, i'm pretty sure "bicep" is a word. go check out our scrabble game.

okay the scrabble dictionary doesn't have it [or i can't find it there] who cares! they or i am dumb :)

yesterday i scored a word for 158 points. has anyone beaten that? the word was "gadflies".

I remembered that we played "scrabble" at Ms Thompson's class, we were having fun with the game, until a friend couldn't come with the ideas of add a few more letter starting with "P", but he surely did noticed that he has two " E " letter, hopefully he could score few more point for adding two "E" after "P", and he got face slapped by our teacher, and some of us bursted in laughter while our teacher sternly told him about going to priciple office for verbal offense. But it was worth fun and funny.

more importantly sarah was your positioning on the board to score so much off mostly mid-level letters like g, d and f.

and I should note that Sarah scored that awesome word against me!

149 is my highest scoring word... for 'agenting.'

boy am i sick of mark kicking my ass in scrabble. it's been over ten years and i can probably count all the games i've won on my left hand. i wanna play somebody who doesn't have the entire OSPD committed to memory for a change. takers?

yes but i forgot how to get there and i probably lack consistency. like jello mark does kick serious ass at scrabble

i'll see if i can get him to e-mail you your info. hold on for a sec...

ok. i got your stuff. e-mail me and i'll send it to you.

I have a game going with you, Heather, I also have two games languishing on Spider and Tbone's turns. And one with my daughter that's been going on for over a year.

i just played the word "futz" for 52 points. the points are inconsequential though. FUTZ!! can you DIG IT?!

futz. yep. Tarkis, you hear that??? get yur clothes off gurl.

online scrabble fills a little void in my life. growing up my family and i played a lot of games together. as kids my sister and i knew how to play pinochle by the age of 9, and we were good. we would sit around the dinner table with our folks and play on the weekends. i can see now as a parent how that would great entertainment for them, with no money and nothing else to do. even younger i loved Candyland and Connect Four and Clue and every board game imaginable. i would want to play them over and over, with anyone i could corral. as i got older, it was beer and Eucher. even older, cocktails and Trivial Pursuit or Pictionary or Taboo, etc etc. senor is not at all into games, so it's something i miss in my day to day life. playing games is something i hope to do a lot of once the girls get older. there's nothing i'd love more than to sit around the dinner table playing pinochle with them in 8-9 years. there's just something about sitting around with friends or family having a drink, conversation, and relating over a game of some sort. it's intimate, competitive, fun. online scrabble definitely has that kind of quality to it. to me it's just as much about the company as it is about the game.

Man, I never quite realized the void that the lack of board games was leaving in my life until you brought it up. My dad and I used to play Monopoly, backgammon, chess, and canasta all the time when I was growing up. Board games with the family are indeed awesome. I wonder why it is that as adults, we tend to turn away from board games?

Even as a youth, I didn't play many board games: I was an only child, lived in the rural farmland of appalachia, and was isolated seven miles from school. There were two or three kids my age on the road (over a three mile segment up a holler)and then there was only one in my early teens. We tromped through the woods, made tunnels in six feet deep snow drifts, shot one another with bb guns. But my neightbor was an old man (who ultimately committed suicide by falling accidentally on purpose on a scissors) who before he died taught me how to drink and philosophize. Nothing more, drink and talk about life and death and tv tables. Never played cards but once learned and quickly forget how to play canasta, eucher, and pinnocle, but my father by absent modeling taught me about cards, never to play them. My uncle Jim and Aunt edna would get drunk and tipsy respectively, and loud and obnoxious, both of them, playing cards and then a poker game or two. fights nastiness and craziness, the latter being a staple of my youth ensued. Dad's father had lost the farm in a game, and for some unknown reaason, my poor as anything young father somehow bought the farm back when I was six months old. No one ever questioned where the money came from,or where it went. I suspect gambling and drinking were large portions of their time. My cousin (I had ONE) and i played sometimes clue and monopoly. In high school, on band trips, when I wasn't lusting after Tarkis but nuzzling someother band member on band trips (cuz tarkis wouldn't even look my way), chums would play all sorts of cards. I always felt a loner and outsider cuz I didn't or rather couldn't play cards worth shit. This persists today. I learned to play chess and backgammon as an adolt, but couldn't play a game of either right now.

oh yes, backgammon. my dad taught me how to play that at a very young age. it was often the centerpiece of our evenings together. he never let me win. when i did, it was because i played well. my dad and i hardly ever play backgammon anymore when we visit. last time my whole family was here for thanksgiving we played Sequence; we had a blast. now i'm remembering as a kid trips up north to go camping and endless games of Uno and Yatzee and Boggle in the rented motor home all the way up, nights around the campfire, and all the way home again.

id love to play with someone if theres an opportunity. i had a login some years ago.