Yet another indication of what an unGodly (indirect) timesucker this board can be…a fellow Doper mentioned in a recent thread which I can no longer recall, that she was a big fan of Bookworm on the Popcap Games Site. So I checked it out.
Now, I’ve played a few times into the 200 000 point range, but just now I got a 307000 point game (and I started being sloppy at the end cos I was tired…honest ). There is no high score board that I can find and I am just curious how scores like these rate.
Any fellow Dopers fans of this game? Can you recall any scores?
Also, what kinds of strategies do you use? I used to put a lot of effort into finding the bonus words but this doesn’t seem to pay off proportionally to the effort involved (i.e. I seem to be a lot better off hunting 5 and 6 letter combos throughout the board than tying up one corner trying to accumulate the letters for “pyx” or some such). I also find that I am routinely getting screwed up because I will see a cluster which can be rearranged into a word (as though they were tiles on a scrabble rail, if you see what I mean) but of course that particular word can’t be resolved by a path allowable in the game.
Lately I am finding that the game is slow to start…low word scores, no sweating from the burning letters, so I try and hold to a 4 letter minimum for the first few levels.
Wow! I thought I was doing good with a score of 87 K!
As far as strategy goes, I have none, unless you consider “trying” out a word to see if a score results as strategy. Sometimes I’m just guessing and it pays off.
Just curious, my score got me the Librarian rank. What rank did you achieve with your 300K?
That was me, I think, trying to post something interesting. I’ve gotten to Master Librarian-- I don’t know what score. My strategy is to get the bonus tiles in the longer words. Let the bonus tiles pile up in one or two lines for a while and see what I can come up with.
I also get rid of the burning ones as soon as possible. I don’t bother trying to score big with those.
I started playing it and it just went on and on and on and on. Finally I got bored and quit. I had passed 300k and got about 7 red tiles but easily got rid of them and after making about 7 more words I quit.
Actually I learned to like the red tiles as they got rid of nasty letters. For instance if I had a whole bunch of i’s and u’s in one corner I’d let the red tile burn down as far as possible before I got rid of it.
Also I had 450,000 points and a clear board, easy sailing for quite some time, when suddenly I was reminded why I stopped playing alchemy at popcam. Every now and then it causes my computer to reboot. Crap!
I have (very childishly) been testing which words that the game will accept. So far I’ve determined that Shit, Turd and Cunts are acceptable, but Poo is not.
What’s the best word you guys have gotten? I tried for Porcelein, but ended up killing myself. I can’t remember the word itself, but I got a little over 7,000 for a relatively ordinary word, with the help of a couple of gold and green letters.
My husband and I have been playing a lot! He got dependant once, and it didn’t know it, so he changed it to “pendant” and that went through. I’ve gotten braw and sarky (I have no idea what either of these mean) but it won’t accept acerb, aries, orion, santa, or asia.
Strategies: you get gold tiles for making long words. Gold tiles don’t burn, so you can line them up across the bottom and make a barrier against burning tiles and just keep playing ad naseum. The more three-letter words you do, the more burning tiles you get.
I don’t remember my score, but I made it to Grand Archivist once. Sometimes if you’ve got a lot of vowels and not much else it’s worth it to let the worm scramble the letters, or to do lots of 3-letter words- both of these things create lots of burning tiles, which will eliminate some of the useless tiles if allowed to stay for a couple of turns.
I didn’t know the gold tiles wouldn’t burn- I’ll have to keep that strategy in mind.
Dang, no time for lengthy reply! LOL While it was still in BETA format, I scored over 1,000,000 pts; I forget what the name was, but it was something biblio. or biblio-something. LOL Most I’ve scored since it went public has been 3-400K, Grand Archivist or some such.
I have a feeling I’m developing a new addiction–I got a measly 64,000 my first go (but that includes having to minimize it suddenly when my boss walks by and bringing up something that looks like work, thereby losing my flow).
). There is no high score board that I can find and I am just curious how scores like these rate.
