Other posters have given excellent advice on handicapping and setting spreads. The bolded part of your post suggests to me why he loves kicking your ass online, and why you don’t enjoy it very much. You both know that when you play Scrabble in real time/in person, you are perfectly suited. But now that you play online, what used to be a mutually satisfying game is now unfairly lopsided. In a way, given that it apparently takes him awhile to come up with his amazing moves, he’s not as good at it (to the extent that the game requires both speed AND vocabulary) as he appears.
Is there some way to enforce a time limit to his turns, so that game play more closely resembles real-life play?
To me, it’s almost like giving allowing someone to take an exam online. In his case, it’s not the online part but the unlimited time that allows him to perform better than he would otherwise.
Agreed, and I’ve done that, but I have certain standards about what constitutes “cannot win.”
There’s a slippery slope here. I’ve seen people quit because they judge they’re way too far behind, then because they’re somewhat behind, and then (in the worst cases) every time their opponent gets an advantage. But if THEY get the advantage, they don’t quit. I guess these people tell themselves they’re cleverly conserving their playing time, not wasting it on uphill struggles. I personally suspect it comes from playing solo against computers, where you can save and reload every time something goes against you. Taken to extremes, it’s kind of sociopathic.
For example, in games of Axis and Allies, one can spend resources on long-shot die rolls for technological developments instead of military units. I have seen a player judiciously gamble one small amount on the first turn and be rewarded with the most potent technical advance (all the more potent because he got it turn one without spending/wasting very much). If I then were to quit, before he even got to bring the tech into play, not only would he not get to play with it, but it would invalidate his carefully-judged expenditure of resources. It’s not like I was expecting to let him resign if his die roll was bad, forcing him to start the game with fewer troops, after all, so why should I get to quit? But of course he crushed me (and my partner). I’ve ALSO seen this abused in the reverse direction – someone gambling ALL his resources on tech, rolling nothing, and then pulling the “I’m too poor to compete, I quit” card shortly thereafter. Bad form, IMHO.
Also, if you never play against long odds, you never get to experience dramatic comebacks.
There are some kinds of games where one acquires a cumulatively stronger position and the strength is then used to secure victory. In those games, I hate to see the other side quit every time one side gets strong, because it’s kind of like one only gets to play half the game – the preparatory struggle for a strong position. Other players could ask me, “isn’t it great when you get X or Y?” and I’d have to respond, “How would I know? Never have gotten a chance to use them.” And it’s not about padding my ego by running up the score (in that type of game, anyway – I admit such behavior is possible in many games.) Sometimes the play’s the thing.
Well of course it’s going to depend on the game. And I don’t think “mathematically impossible to win” is very much of a slippery slope at all. It seems rather a bright line, in fact, provided the rules are such that you can calculate that.
When I would play real-time strategy games like Red Alert and Starcraft, I never conceded the match. I made my opponent hunt down every last unit I had on the board. One, because playing the game is fun in itself, and given that RTS matches can last for an hour or more, sometimes it’s better to get a few extra minutes of fun rather than end early and decide whether or not to start up a new hour+. Second, in those games, depending on the units you have it certainly is possible to make a dramatic comeback, so (to beat a dead horse) it was not mathematically impossible. Highly improbable, certainly, but more than once I’ve been able to make a fight of it despite 90% of my forces being destroyed.
But different games have different rules, and sometimes it is possible to land in a no-win situation. In those situations, conceding gracefully is better than stubbornly refusing to admit loss.
bolding mine. yes, it definitely depends on the game. however, assuming that you mean you would never click the ‘surrender’ button, i am sure it is generally considered unsportmanslike to make your opponent hunt for you when victory is certain. so much so that the game has been designed to reveal your position once all Command Centres have been destroyed.
the physical boardgame, Risk, is a game i have never seen the last remaining opponent play to the last troop.
Scrabble is not a game in which this is very likely to occur, and the OP happens to be about Scrabble, not Pictionary, not Chess, not Risk, and not Starcraft. It is almost never “mathematically impossible” to change the tide of the game unless you are really almost out of tiles (ie, the game is virtually over). You can always block in another player, forcing them to play low-point words, while you stage a triple-word score upset. and you can always throw down xyzygy with the Z on a triple letter score and change the game completely.
Thus as pertains to Scrabble, the “mathematically impossible” scenario is a bit of a red herring because it is fairly rare. The OP either doesn’t understand math, doesn’t understand Scrabble, or actually… wait for it.. resents her husband for other reasons, making his repeated wins intolerable.
To use my friend’s and my own terminology, I hated when people played “hide the farm” and I found it dickish. It’s annoying when people quit a quarter of the way through, yes, but when they hid a bunch of cheap or useless structures around the map and made you play hide and seek (this was in Warcraft III before they added map reveal if your enemy had no town hall). It was wasting my time, and I always thought it was an obvious ploy to make you give up out of annoyance. Some people could draw their little game of hide-and-seek out for half an hour or more. That means they would hide units and structures around the map, where they couldn’t even get resources to make a comeback for almost a third of the game.
It sounds to me that your husband needs cast a bigger net to find players that are more on his level.
How much fun could it possibly be to win by such a wide margin, again and again? It must be like playing Candy Land with 7 years olds for all eternity.
In the wordgames I play, there is at least one person I always lose against. But we’re casually acquainted <online>, so it’s a regular thing to play, and my goal is just to see if I can even get CLOSE to winning, lol. In other games, against strangers particularly, I feel bad when I win by a ton and then have to decide whether to re-challenge. Will the other person not look forward to it? Will I seem like a pompous ass if I don’t rechallenge? I’ve got a couple of Wordfriends with whom I have several games going at once, because we’re matched well enough that the random chance of letter selection really comes into play, and it’s fun to see how high we can get the scores.
As far as the OP: I’d say your husband is being a spoil-sport for insisting on a bloody finish, when there’s opportunity for a new game once it’s established that you won’t be coming back to win.
Sure, if you sneak in an extra “Y” tile (the game only has 2). More to the point though, you can’t always do what you’ve listed. Sometimes, yes, but not always.
I think you’re seriously overstating the possibility of overcoming a 150 point lead. Of course it will be in the latter part of the game, but not necessarily when the tiles are almost gone. The layout of played tiles can significantly restrict potential plays, and what I have found to be rare is having double- and triple-score squares available that can actually be used. I think an experienced player like the OP can observe what tiles have been played along with what opportunities are still on the board and make a pretty accurate assessment of the possiblity of coming back from so far behind.
You make a valid point, but there’s another dynamic that you need to factor in when playing online as opposed to the physical game: you can play words that you didn’t know existed.
Example: during one game a few weeks ago, I was trying to find a word that ended in the letter “f” so I could form 2 words instead of just one (the words “be” and “ore” were one space apart as I recall… so I needed to find a word that ended with “f” for a killer score). Looking at my letters, I thought ‘dang, if I had a “b” I could do “barf”.’ I had no “b”. I DID have a “z” so I layed out “zarf” and luckily enough the “z” was on either a double or triple letter square, and hit “play”. Whattya know, “zarf” is a word! I still don’t know what it means though.
There are many games that, if the contest is reasonably close, are fun and interesting for both sides, and remain fun to the end even if you wind up on the losing side. But if one side is shellacking the other, it’s no fun for the loser, and even kinda boring to be on the winning side.
In games like this, winning isn’t the only enjoyable thing, but being competitive for most of the game is pretty close to a necessary condition for both players to have a good time.
Some games, like cribbage, have other benchmarks to keep things interesting even if you’re way behind: maybe you’ve got no chance of winning, but you can still fight to avoid getting skunked. But even there, it’s still the fact that there’s some tension as to what the outcome will be that keeps the spice in the game.
Given that I only ever played with my friends, if they found it tiresome they had ample opportunity to say so. Which I suppose goes to the broader point: etiquette is whatever the people involved say it is. Ground rules for a wide community can be established, but if one pocket of people prefer doing it one way and another pocket prefer doing it another and never the twain shall meet, then it hardly matters to one what the other thinks of its internal rules.
Sounds like what makes it unfun (<- should be a word) is that husband plays to win. Even if you would be interested in playing for the fun of making words with letters, there is little fun in that if the person you’re playing with plays it from a different perspective.
That’s what I find, anyway. I hate games, they make nice people nasty. I only really like scrabble, because there is a point to it other than winning, but I hate playing people who just want to win. And I would usually win at scrabble if I didn’t help the others when they asked.
Anyway, if it’s about winning, and there is mathematically no way for your opponent to win anymore then you have won, and the game ends. Conceding is SOP in many games, chess has been mentioned and I think you win at table tennis if it’s 11-0(?). It is always rude to insist on continuing a game purely to slaughter someone, to make the other party feel bad and when you know the other party has lost enjoyment. This is in no way part of the game. The point of a game is friendly test of skill against each other. Once that has been determined in a particular game, the game ends. The ego-trip, unfortunately, does not.
On a vaguely related note, I’m getting seriously peeved by the number of people in various drawing game apps who for some reason decide that if they can’t figure out how to draw something, it’s ok to just go ahead and write it instead.
I belong to a board game group and, while Scrabble isn’t one of our regular games, I will sometimes find myself having the same problem. I’ve found that if I just play the games for fun then I don’t really care who wins. We play Trivial Pursuit sometimes and as soon as the game is pulled out I am resigned to the fact that I will not be able to answer a single question (my memory recall of facts is low), but it’s funny to watch the other players spout out these amazing facts. With Anagrams and Bananagrams I usually just sit back and watch. Then, there are other games that I do really well in.
Could you set different goals for yourself and your husband? Or try to beat your own score from the previous game instead of each other. You’re right that it’s no fun to loose every time but if you think of it as an experience instead of a contest then it might be easier. You said that he has a competitive edge. He would probably get more of a challenge competing against himself.
Another thing, I noticed that the games you mentioned were all word games. There are plenty of other games out there that you might enjoy. Balderdash is a good group game that involves making up movie plots, obscure laws, and other funny things. If you like drawing (or don’t, either way) you might try Luck of the Draw in which everyone is given a short time to draw something and then the group votes on the drawings based on categories that aren’t revealed until after the drawings are completed. With categories like “roundest,” “strangest,” and “most likely to be something Freud came up with,” you don’t have to be the best drawer to win. Half the point of the game is to joke about people’s hastily made pictures. The card game Once Upon a Time requires the group to tell a fairy tale story using the cards in their hand. The first one who can get rid of all of their cards wins.
As for two person games: I’ve been recently introduced to Sequence, which is a lot like Connect 4, but a lot more complicated. Mancala is another good game, and Racko can be played with two players. Plus there are card games like Spit and Gin Rummy that you could try. He may be faster at you in rearranging letters, but not all minds think the same way. Maybe you can find an area where you rule the game.
I just realized that I never answered the original question. I do think that the mercy rule should be allowed in extreme cases, however if you know there’s going to be a problem before the game even begins then I think that there are ways to avoid it (see previous post).
Quitting a friendly Scrabble game “just because you’re losing” might be borderline childish, while resigning a chess game when in a losing position against a stronger opponent is quite acceptable, if not expected.
Backgammon (in which you often play a series of games for cumulative points and/or money) has an elegant way of dealing with this in the form of the doubling cube - if one player feels they’re far ahead they can offer their opponent the choice of forfeiting and getting on with the next game, or playing on but for double stakes…
More to the point though, you can’t always do what you’ve listed. Sometimes, yes, but not always.