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e-scrabble
Aug. 3rd, 2004 05:05 pmMy scrabble theories still hold: In a four-player game of scrabble where the participants are closely matched in skill, the things which seem to create winners out of chaos are the fifty-point use-all-the-tiles bonus and the disparity in number-of-turns created when anybody but the fourth player is the one to go out. In four-handed games, there are fewer turns; often as few as six or seven. This means points-per-person in general tend to be lower, making the fifty-point bonus more significant, and one turn's worth of points is a higher percentage of a player's total, making the lost turn in the last round more significant. (this all goes for three-handed games as well, but to a lesser extent. the rules seem to me to be optimized for two-player games.)
In the most recent two scrabble games I've played (one real-life, one online) I won one I really feel like I shouldn't have, due to the fifty-point bonus I wasn't expecting when I played every tile in my hand, and tied for last once when I had been in second place for the entire game, first turn through sixth...and then everybody but me got a seventh.
I guess it's pretty unusual, though, for four people to be *that* well-matched. In the second game, we all four stayed within a handful of percent of each other's score the whole game. The first game, I didn't follow the score closely enough to say, but without my fifty-point bonus I would have come in second or last with a less-than-eight-point spread between the three of us. I sure as hell was not the best scrabble player involved; I *may* have been tied for second-best player, in that three-handed game.
Very interesting. I've verified what I always suspected, too, about how I like to play scrabble -- either in person with non-hurried people and *nothing* else around to distract me, or online not-in-realtime so I don't have to feel like my difficulty focusing on the tiles is holding other people up.
in other news, I seem to have either been attacked by an invisible handful of sand or I'm having a sudden allergic reaction to some unknown substance; my left eye seems to be slowly swelling shut. damn. that's always annoying.
In the most recent two scrabble games I've played (one real-life, one online) I won one I really feel like I shouldn't have, due to the fifty-point bonus I wasn't expecting when I played every tile in my hand, and tied for last once when I had been in second place for the entire game, first turn through sixth...and then everybody but me got a seventh.
I guess it's pretty unusual, though, for four people to be *that* well-matched. In the second game, we all four stayed within a handful of percent of each other's score the whole game. The first game, I didn't follow the score closely enough to say, but without my fifty-point bonus I would have come in second or last with a less-than-eight-point spread between the three of us. I sure as hell was not the best scrabble player involved; I *may* have been tied for second-best player, in that three-handed game.
Very interesting. I've verified what I always suspected, too, about how I like to play scrabble -- either in person with non-hurried people and *nothing* else around to distract me, or online not-in-realtime so I don't have to feel like my difficulty focusing on the tiles is holding other people up.
in other news, I seem to have either been attacked by an invisible handful of sand or I'm having a sudden allergic reaction to some unknown substance; my left eye seems to be slowly swelling shut. damn. that's always annoying.