The mobile revolution

[davidn]

The world's longest game of Scrabble came to an end this week, with ravenworks finally besting me by 23 points in a game that started in September and rapidly degenerated into a Most Rubbish Word contest. There's something vastly unjust about the way that "Quark" and "Helios" can score mediocre amounts, and yet be effectively countered by words like "HEY", "ARF" and (a 31-pointer from me) "ZA". What's a za? I was only fiddling around with the triple-letter square to see if it would accept such tomfoolery.

Now that I'm getting used to the iPhone and all it can do for me, something I'm still unsure of is its choice of weather icons. I have mentioned the apocalyptic raining sun before, but in Inverurie on Wednesday, it would seem that it's telling me it's going to snow upwards. That, and that at this time of year the temperatures resemble a fairly decent golf scorecard.

I used to love the prospect of snow. Now it just feels like a massive inconvenience. Such is the injustice of life.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I have been wanting to play a variant on Scrabble for a long time -- one that doesn't have any bonus tiles on the board, and your only points are derived from the value on the tiles that you place, multiplied by how many you placed at once. So, if you stick an 'S' on the end of a word, it's only worth the 1 point on the S tile, not the entire value of the word you're stemming...

(Obviously when I say "times the length of the word" it would be dampened somewhat, like 1 letter = x1, 2 letters = x1.1, 3 letters = x1.2, etc..)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

also, it would be cool if the tiles you play didn't have to be in a line -- they would still have to be connected to a previous tile of your hand by an unbroken line of existing tiles (so you can't just drop tiles anywhere on the board), but, for instance, you could make a sort of zig-zag through several different words if you were able.

[davidn]

Due to the complexity of the scores (especially when dealing with fractional point values) it would have to be a variant that existed only on the computer, but yes - I think somebody needs to write this, now :) It would certainly reward... good words more.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

There could be a simple "round up" rule, but yeah, a computer would help...

It seems like it would be easy enough to implement in an existing scrabble game... it looks like there are a few open-source Scrabble games, but none of them play online, and without that, what's the point ;)

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

At Anthrocon last year we played Scrabble. Ootachi ruined everything by being a tourneyfag. He played Za.

It is in the scrabble dictionary. It is another word for Pizza.

Scrabble has since been banned from our group.

[davidn]

Short for 'pizza'? Was two syllables just too much to handle or something?