There was one girl I grew up with that I used to play with. I would annihilate her repeatedly, regularly outscoring her 400-150. Then one game she started out with three bingos in a row (really obscure words like scientific terms and the like) - it was clear she’d found a nice cheat program. I think I played one or two more games and then just let it lapse and never played her again. If you’re going to cheat, at least try to make your improvement look natural.
I will admit to having used a word finder once. But in my defense, I had 4 I’s and 2 O’s on my board.
I don’t use any word finders. But I love to play, feel free to start a game with me at any time. dalej42 is my name on WWF as well.
Challenging you now. I’m probably a decent ‘living room player’, but probably terrible by competitive standards. We’ll see…
I play a couple of Dopers, one kills me every time. I challenge you to a duel, sir! I don’t use word finders, either. (and it shows)
I just started playing with a few friends and relatives.
I used to play scrabble online, and I got to know all three letter words and vowel dumps. like aerie. I know one gal is using some sort of outside help but my record against her is like 12-2 in my favor.
They are starting learn that the key to scrabble and WWF is (generally) playing parallel to the words, not perpendicular to the words.
It happens. I had a friend who would routinely kick my ass (and I’m no slouch at the game). One we were together and we played a live, head-to-head game. Suddenly he was struggling to put “cat” on the board. Dude…busted.
I generally don’t cheat, and I wipe out some of my opponents and am wiped out by others. But I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.
Even if the other person is consistently cheating and soundly beating me, the game is still fun. Nothing the other person can do will make the challenge of getting a good score from my tiles on my turn any less fun.
Plenty of people play solitaire versions of two+ player games against a computer opponent and don’t complain about it “cheating”.
What I think is worse is when someone forfeits because they do t think they can win. So what? Each turn is still fun. Do you really only enjoy the two seconds at the end of the game when your tally is highest?
It’s funny how different games have different etiquette for this kind of thing. In chess, it’s generally considered bad etiquette to continue playing in a hopeless position. Although one difference with Scrabble is that in some cases the margin of victory is important, IIRC.
The Scrabble iPhone app has the same problem, where you can simply try different plays, and the game just tells you if your play is illegal. It also has a “teacher” function, where after your turn, the teacher will show you a high-value play you could have made. The problem with this is that often that play is still available on your next turn as well.
I agree with the suggestion above that there should be an option to play with more traditional rules, where invalid plays are allowed and can be challenged by the other player.
I just wish there was a record keeping function. How many games have I played? How many have I won? How many have I won against this opponent? I can’t believe it’s not available. Why is there no record keeping!
This, plus they should give everyone ratings like in chess. I had to stop requesting random opponents because it’s not fun playing someone with no vocabulary and no concept of strategy. A simple rating system would solve that problem and be no trouble at all to implement.
I guess you could just ask what the hell that word is and see if their answer is a dictionary definition, a personally-worded definition or an hones admission that they were just trying letter combinations.
I’ve been asked that few times and my answer has mostly been to say how I know the word or that I was just trying something that looked like it could be a word. But I even got asked this about the word ‘het.’ You know, like in ‘het up.’ That’s not that weird a word. And you do tend to know the 2-letter words just by playing a lot.
WWF doesn’t allow “po,” though. A po is a bedpan - it’s an ordinary word. At least it is in the UK, and we’re using the “international” dictionary, not US. Why don’t they include it?
Mostly I play on my phone while walking the dogs. Cheating would be far too much effort. What’s the point, anyway? “My cheat programme is better than yours?”
I noticed today that WWF has some paying options where it’ll tell you what tiles are left over and give some other hints of words to use. That seems like cheating to me too.
There was an online Scrabble game I used to play - I think it was Scrabulizer - that did have this as an option. It is a good idea.
That is odd; you wouldn’t think it’d be difficult to do.
I play, and one thing a few of my friends and I started doing was creating a “theme” for the game. For example, when starting one game with a friend, I started with the word “martini” and sent him a message that said “Only words that had to do with drinking.” So gin, beer, vomit, binge, etc. gets played. Then we get to have a hilarious discussion later about how “burrito” is a drinking word. His response was, “that’s my favorite drunk food.” I had no rebuttal.
Not cheating – just a time-saver. There are plenty of times where I think to myself “I’ll be able to make a great word if I can pull a ‘D’…wait [counts all the 'D’s on the board], damn, none left”. No different than counting the tiles in a live game of Scrabble. This just make it easier to tell if there are any left or not.
That is cheating.
Judge John Hodgman has addressed the issue of what constitutes cheating in online Scrabble-like word games.
It isn’t just about the words, of course, but how you play. I have played a lot of scrabble in my day and it is obvious when I am playing someone who is not aware of the strategic aspects, like setting up TW for me or not taking it away when possible (some folks think the best play is just the highest scoring word each round). When I first met my wife we would play and I would put low scoring words on Triple word scores and I would purposely avoid giving openings as best as I could. She wasn’t used to this and she called it dirty scrabble (which could have a totally different meaning, of course). But I told her it was strategic and now she regularly beats me playing “dirty” scrabble.
The difference is huge. In chess, what you can do is affected entirely by all the preceding moves you and your opponent played. There is no element of chance, other than the toss determining who is white. In scrabble, on the other hand, every next move is essentially a new game with at least some letters. Just because someone else is killing it and all you have played so far is crap, does not mean that you cannot come back on a next turn, or that the other players luck might not change. So the challenge is continuous and just because you are way down and winning the game is impossible, you might still be able to play a great move. This is not the case in chess, where you can predict several moves in advance what is going to happen, and you can also predict that the game is going nowhere for you or for your opponent. This means it makes sense for people to just give up when their position is terrible. For scrabble, there is relatively little strategizing and you cannot really look moves ahead because you have too little information - but that also means that the game can turn more easily without either of the players making mistakes, and that even when you’re down, the next moves can still be a good fun challenge to play.
While we’re on the topic of WWF, I just got this rack and I can’t quite piece together what might be there…
If you only had an A you could play drytuna.