Scrabble, Anonymous
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
https://www.michaelfogleman.com/projects/word-warrior/
In the process I discovered all sorts of vulnerabilities (potential cheating vectors). Nothing prevented a malicious client from:
- picking your own tiles (even if they no longer exist in the bag)
- seeing your opponent's tiles
- setting your clock to any value after making a move
- aborting a game at any time without opponent approval
If you exchanged tiles, the number of tiles you exchanged was sent through the # of seconds on your clock. So if you exchanged 3 tiles at a point where you had 1m40s on your clock, it would change to 1m43s or 1m33s or something like that! There was no other way to communicate to the server how many tiles you exchanged.
I never took advantage of any of this. Like I said, I just wanted a nicer GUI to play Scrabble on. But I was pretty shocked at what I discovered in the process.
Not sure if anything has changed since then!
We were not a board game family, apart from the occasional attempt to get through Monopoly without my little sister flinging it onto the floor. My partner, however is from board game people. When we're with her family, there are dice and cards and tokens, words and numbers fly through the air, and I am utterly lost. I played Scrabble with her once. I used to think I was smart.
I play Wordfeud (a Scrabble clone) with my wife and mother. The three of us are quite competitive with each other. My mother-in-law played a few games, lost each of them, and then called it. Because her idea of having fun is, well, not doing your best. My mother had colleagues whom she played games with (quizzes I think?), and they were terrible simply because she doesn't care. An old book on this is 'Play To Win' by Dave Sirlin.
Anyway, legend has it the people who are best at Scrabble are from an SE Asian country (not sure which one it was), often barely speak English, but know all the 2 and 3 letter combinations and are able to lay those down well.
I suppose this isn't the only way to play Magic Maze. But why settle for less? :)
It's not just the 2 or 3 letter combinations, but knowing the combinations that work well together to form bingos (using all 7 letters) that lead to better chances for victory.
I just wonder, since they don't know English, but do recognize the patterns of words, couldn't one play what merely resemble words if it's beneficial? That is, play the "word", "HACKISH" to score at least 69 points (19 for letters + 50 for the bingo).
Like that dude who won a French scrabble tournament despite not knowing French.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ayBTn59PliQ&pp=ygUVc2NyYWJibGU...
No seriously, you'd be (like I was) surprised at how sweaty a game that appears for all the world like a /Mario Party/ clone can get.
> [Elizabeth Magie] originally intended The Landlord's Game to illustrate the economic consequences of Ricardo's Law of economic rent and the Georgist concepts of economic privilege and land value taxation.
I could see how others would feel they can relate to that.
Think Scrabble on a hexagonal board, with territory capture mechanics.
I had a background playing internet chess. I started with yahoo and gravitated towards lightning (1/0 time controls). I think there's more than a grain of truth to the quotation, "I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol." ~ attributed to Nigel Short, English grandmaster. Fast-paced board games that deliver rewards are addictive.
As a student of neurotransmitters, I can attest that playing blitz chess or scrabble does result in dopamine hits. Particular to Scrabble, one can receive such a hit of dopamine from a bingo (50 point bonus for playing all seven tiles). In a three minute (or less) time control, a medium to expert player can look forward to an average of two of these per game. All that's missing from this slot machine is the lights and sounds.
Isc.ro is a unique little corner of the internet. It's navigated away from a downloaded console to a browser. It has its fair share of persistent trolls. There's a chat room, channel 20, that used to regularly have over 100 members active at any given time, and significantly more than that during peak hours.
Competitive scrabble as a community peaked, IMO, in 2004 with the nationals in New Orleans. There's a Sports Illustrated article chronicling its subsequent problems [2]. NASPA in particular is undemocratic in its governance and pushed a woke agenda during the pandemic, resulting in the removal of hundreds of words from the official lexicons. The net result is there are now at least 4 dictionaries, fracturing an already small and arguably dwindling community of word enthusiasts.
An alternative to NASPA in the competitive Scrabble tournament and club scene is WGPO [3]. My personal experience is that most mid-size cities have clubs, and you'll meet worthwhile people in them. I liked to say, at a Scrabble club I always felt comfortable that I was typically not the most nor the least odd fellow there but rather squarely in the middle of the pack.
I've noticed a pattern at the Internet Scrabble Club that I also noticed at the Free Internet Chess Server (fics.org), where I migrated after Yahoo games was phased out: a loss of members. ISC now competes with numerous viable alternatives easily accessible from a smartphone. In its heyday, it was unique place where you could navigate the interface with telnet commands. [Insert finger pun here.]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Freak [2] https://www.si.com/more-sports/2020/10/26/how-scrabble-blew-... [3] https://wordgameplayers.org/
Edited: for grammar and clarity.
Is there any technical reason why ISC never became easily accessible from a smartphone? Have there been attempts?
Official mobile games have to be ruined by aggressive monetisation and scammy in-app ads, it seems.
Words With Friends got away with a making A Scrabble clone by using a slightly different board layout and dictionary. But they eventually transformed that into a very annoying experience overloaded with the usual F2P clutter.
WordFeud seems to be the recommended mobile Scrabble clone these days.
So how does Wordfeud get around copyright issues with Hasbro? Do they pay them a royalty?
I understand game makers need to pay rent too, that is why I spent that 5$ to support them. But they treated their customer (me) like shit, lost me forever. Good job guys
This insatiable greed to make more and more and more money...Yikes
So far, Wordfeud hasn't done anything crappy like this. I hope they stay that way
Speaking to an earlier point, the domain of ".ro" may reflect a reality of who has licensing of Scrabble in Romania, and also outside of the U.S. and U.K. I'm not up to date on all of that.
That sounds like a positive to me, but I'm a filthy leftoid, so. :þ