Nowhere to play it, right?

So frustrating.

Update: Wrong! Could have hooked it on to make (OKE)H.

Scrabolex

The good old scrabolous game has come back to life in the form of "Lexulous (renamed)" (sic). Andrew and I picked up one of our old games where we had left off, and we've been discussing some of the changes they had to make to comply with Hasbro's absurd intellectual property claims. The differences include:

• a different board layout (it was even more different, including quad word scores, but they changed it to something closer to the original);
• fewer tiles, some of which score higher; and
• eight-tile racks, with a 40-point medium bonus for playing seven tiles and the regular 50-point bingo bonus for playing all eight.

So far, the bigger racks (what? Why are you looking at me like that?) seem to have had the most noticeable impact. As Andrew pointed out, the opportunities for hitting a double-triple are vastly increased because you have enough tiles on your own to reach from one TWS to another without building around an existing tile. But in general just having that extra letter to play with means you are going to be able play seven tiles a lot more often, for almost as many points as a full bingo.

I was looking around the internets to see if anyone had taken a crack at adapting computer programs to play the lexolous rules (Quackle allows different boards at runtime, but the tile sets and rack sizes are hardcoded), and I found the site of this crackpot whose stuff I've looked at before. He invented Octo Scrabble (scrabble with eight-tile racks, including a scaled bingo scoring system) a year ago, and swears by it.

(The reason I call him a "crackpot," though he is possibly more accurately merely an especially creative curmudgeon, is because he also has suggestions for how to reform basketball, the justice system, piano notation, units of measure, parade viewing, and ice water consumption. Among many, many other things. Also, it seems that 55 years ago one could buy leg padding not two blocks from my house.)

Back to the topic at hand, the other differences in the game don't seem as major as the rack enlengthening...you can sort of see some of Andrew's and my plays sticking to the new lines of multiplier squares in our first game the way they stick to their counterparts in regular corporate scrabble, but that stands to reason, and since the layout is pretty similar in qualitative (better multipliers as you get further from the center) and almost identical in quantitative terms (the official game has one more TLS per quadrant and they otherwise match), it doesn't seem to affect how the game plays very much.

What I'd really like to do is to run an AI against itself (nullus) for a couple tens of thousands of games under each rule set, and see how the size and variability of scores compare. Until then I did take the time to chart the differences in tile scores and frequencies:

Really, they seem to have mostly just scaled back the number of tiles (resulting in more games played, which translates to more "x started a new game of Lexulous" messages on Facebook), upping the tile values to keep scores up (Lexulous has 11 fewer tiles, but they average 2.3 points to Scrabble's 1.9).

So that's all I've got on that score. Realistically, I am unlikely to try to hack Quackle myself to get an idea about how the lexolous rules change the familiar game (it builds on Windows, but with MinGW, which I don't have installed, and Qt, which just kill me now).

Not sure if I screwed this up.

So I'm playing a scrabolous game with Nate. He had just played JOG hanging over the bottom triple word:



I was holding ROASTED, which I saw I could play along the left to make STAG. But if I could bingo by hooking my S onto JOG instead then it would be a 100+ point play. I couldn't find an anagram, though, so I did this:



I think it's the first time I've been holding a playable bingo and not played it. And I burned my E,R, and S. My reasoning was: it was worth almost as much as the bingo would have been (60 vs. 66, if I recall); leaving JOGS open would risk most of my bingo points anyway if Nate was holding an S; and I could land my D on the double letter and leave myself with A and T on my rack.



And Nate makes a play on a whole different triple as I draw...another bingo!



Not a very valuable or safe one, admittedly. But still pretty lucky. I think I may have not made the best choice with DOERS, but since I lucked out and didn't get punished for it at all, I'm afraid it might encourage bad habits.

Update: I ran the board past Quackle. DOATERS and TROADES are both valid. None of the AIs recommended DOERS.

Update: Also since Quackle counts tiles for you, I noted that at the time I was deciding whether to play DOERS, I was holding the fourth and final S. You'd think I would have thought to count those since blocking JOGS was a big part of my calculus. I'm an idiot.

Noob of All Trades

I have non-baseball stuff I want to post. While there's no technical barrier to creating a "*n00b" blog for each of my new enthusiasms as they come up, I don't want to mess with my technorate scores and affect my ad rates.

So I've decided instead to embroaden the scope of this here blog to include any topic on which I am a clueless nooby. Which for the time being is probably going to be stuff related to Scrabble or comics or bikes or whatnot, and who knows what all else in the future!

For example, here's some crap I made for playing Scrabble, both PDF files: a score sheet, and a 2- and 3-letter word cheat sheet (from the SOWPODS word list). There are two per page, and they line up if you want to do a score sheet on one side and the cheat sheet on the other.

The score sheet is designed for two player games where each player records their rack for each move, folding the edge of the paper over to obscure the rack columns. That way you have a full record of a game played in real life, and can record it later in something like Quackle and have it tell you all the 100+ point bingos your stupid ass missed. It's great!