I'm playing Scrabulous again with Mary Anne. Good words so far: she led with TILDE, I countered with PORCINI, she played AEGIS. At which point I was just about ready to resign; how can you top AEGIS?<\/p>\n
But then I looked at my tiles and saw that I had a host of possibilities.<\/p>\n
Only most of them didn't quite work.<\/p>\n
I was one tile off from being able to play each of the following:<\/p>\n
I got very excited when I saw that I could use all seven of my tiles to play VICEROIS, which I attempted to do--and then the game told me it was an illegal play. Which is just as well, because that spelling turns out to be wrong. Maybe \"viceroi\" is French? Maybe I just made it up? I had managed to convince myself I'd seen it somewhere, but maybe not.<\/p>\n
At any rate, though I'm glad the game didn't let me play it, I'm confused--I've seen words played in Scrabulous which I thought weren't in their official dictionary; I thought the game left it up to the players to play illegal words if they wanted to (and to the other players to then challenge them).<\/p>\n
. . . But now I see that the main words that I had assumed weren't in the official dictionary--PUJA and TROGS, from two other games--are in fact in the official dictionary. I easily forget that the official dictionary does not match my dictionary of choice, MW11, which doesn't list either of those--although MW3 unabridged lists both. Turns out \"trogs\" is a chiefly Scottish synonym for \"troth.\" (As in \"I pledge thee my trogs.\" But the word sounds too informal and slangy for that. Maybe \"Yo, dude, I pledge thee my trogs.\" Or \"Och, lassie, ye have me feckin' trogs.\") So I guess the game does prevent illegal words. Knowing that would've saved me a lot of trepidation over various words whose spellings I was unsure of. (In my ideal game, if I were unsure of a spelling I would just look it up, but various people had indicated to me that they considered that to be cheating, so I don't do it. But apparently the game will do it for me automatically.)<\/p>\n
In the end, I was faced with a challenge to my Scrabble principles. I had a choice: I could play VIZIERS, a great word, for 11 points; or I could play VICARS, an okay word, across a triple-word-score square for 36 points.<\/p>\n
I am (occasionally) weak; I picked the triple-word option. Partly because I don't think I've ever played a triple-word-score square in Scrabulous (and maybe never in Scrabble); partly because that's a big point difference; partly because Mary Anne whomped me in the last game, 345 to 205 (and did so partly by hitting six of the eight triple word squares); partly because VICARS isn't bad<\/em>, just not as cool as VIZIERS.<\/p>\n Ah, well. Occasional pragmatism is probably a good stretching exercise for idealists. (How's that for a rationalization?)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m playing Scrabulous again with Mary Anne. Good words so far: she led with TILDE, I countered with PORCINI, she…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-language"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}