My favourite waste of time

[j4]

For the last couple of weeks the second-greatest threat to my work-related productivity (after my own natural tendency towards inertia) has been e-scrabble. Delighted though I was with the Travel Scrabble set that addedentry and I bought on impulse in a late-opening Borders so that we could play on the train home, I'm even more delighted with an implementation of the game that only requires an email account, a web browser, and a willing friend or three. It doesn't matter if you take a long time to play, and you can't lose letters down the back of the seat.

There are one or two small issues with it, though to be fair most of them are already addressed in the e-scrabble FAQ and will apparently be fixed in the next release. It's surprisingly (perhaps because so arbitrarily) frustrating that you can't see how many letters remain in the bag unless it's your turn; and no matter what I do I can't get the word-check function to accept any word, from AT to ZOA, though other people seem to have had no problem. Fortunately, the excellent Collins site offers a free word lookup which not only checks your word for Scrabble acceptability (rendering more or less unnecessary wordlists such as Mattel's list of 2-letter words) but also gives definitions from several dictionaries (including the EIF that is the Texting Dictionary). It's amusing to see how many words are declared "valid for play in Scrabble" yet offer no definition; but nobody thought Scrabble was about meanings, did they? (The words are presumably all in Chambers, famous for its amusing definitions.)

The other main annoyance that many people have noted is the inability to shuffle your letters. It's amazing how much harder this makes it, for me at least; it's almost enough to make me go and learn the l33t w3b sk1llz required to write a separate letter-shuffler. Almost. Of course, you can always cheat with an anagram solver, but that takes all the fun out of it.

*

In an attempt to keep my brain shuffling letters inbetween games of e-scrabble, I'm also trying to learn to do cryptic crosswords. Chambers help out here again, providing a selection of crosswords to solve online; after a week of extremely intermittent struggling with the most recent one I've managed a pitiful 16 clues. No hints, or there will be cross words indeed!

Comments

Only a pawn in their game.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

It also seems lacks any way to "find" a game with strangers, as you can with, say Quake...

[setting-sun.livejournal.com]

On a similar note, you should try although it is fiendishly addictive. (http://www.playbabble.com)

[senji.livejournal.com]

scrabble!

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

IME the way to learn cryptic crosswords is to get someone to explain clues and answers to you, which you may think counts as "hinting" but I think counts more as "teaching the rules" :-)

You may (or may not) also find rec.puzzles.crosswords helps in this regard, as people quite often post and say "Apparently X is the solution to Clue Y, can anyone explain?".

There are so many conventions and "tricks" and whatnot that it can be almost impossible to figure out on your own!

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

I lose a lot of time on ItsYourTurn (http://www.itsyourturn.com/). Their version of scrabble is a bit crap, but they have a large number games: chess, checkers, go, connect 4, battleships, backgammon, othello, and plenty of variations on each.

[hoshuteki.livejournal.com]

I've gone off e-Scrabble a little after playing a couple of games with verlaine. Don't make that mistake. Anyway, in "real" Scrabble, there's no way to know exactly how many letters are left in the bag (unless you count them). Still, it would be nice sometimes...

Scrabble online

[(Anonymous)]

Have you tried Quadplex?

http://www.quadplex.com

All you need to register is an email address, & you get real time scrabble with the ability to shuffle your tiles around... It even tells you how many tiles are left.

(Apologies in advance for spreading more productivity-sappers ;-))

Helena