Exchange

In my experience, skipping a move in Scrabble to exchange tiles is an act of desperation, a functional concession that you are going to eventually lose the game.  Part of that is because when The Wife and I play, we are both very competitive with each other, so missing a single turn is often a big setback.  But it worked out for me this morning:

Him		Her
braze	38	whale	21
whales, dust	22	tabloid, brazed	80
(exchanged tiles)	0	cite, it, at, by	24
tabloids, stomach	74	ahu	18
gnomon	18	clover	36
gelato	8	binder	18
maxes, ma, ox, ne	39	vox	13
ingot	10	frappe	32
toga, so, net	17	dias	21
mean	27	drawn	11
qi	21	fin, qi	25
keno	16	jars	18
fee	6	mi	4
ye, yore	42	ki	6
pea	7	I, I, U, U	-4
TOTAL:	354	TOTAL:	323

The Wife had the same problem late in the game that I had early -- all vowels and no consonants. To do well, you need a good blend of both. I got lucky in being able to make a seven-tile word immediately after my exchange, and thereafter got a better blend -- leaving a vowel-heavy bank of tiles to draw on later in the game, but at that point there were no other tiles to exchange, so we both wound up having to squeeze vowels onto the existing board.

What's more, by exchanging early, there was still a lot of open board for me to place that seven-tile word at all -- it's sometimes the case that you have a seven- or eight-letter word you can make late in the game but there are no places on the grid still available with enough room to do it.

The lesson here is, if you are going to take the big gamel and exchange, it will only pay off if you do it early in the game.

New Clue

My in-laws enjoy playing board games when The Wife and I come to visit. Last night, with my brother-in-law around, we had five for dinner and games. So the game of choice was Clue.

They have a classic game -- the original issue that was published in the U.S. in 1949. The graphics on the board are very old and charmingly antiquated, and they have all the pieces of the game still, except for the "lead pipe" piece. This apparently caused my mother-in-law some amount of distress; she didn't want to use a broken toothpick to substitute for the weapon, so we went to Wal-Mart and got a new game.

To our surprise, the publishers have changed the game considerably. There are more cards, more possible murder weapons, a better vision of the kinds of rooms one would expect in a rich person's house in the early twenty-first century (we really don't have conservatories any more, so a spa seems a much better substitute) and some interesting variants on the rules like unique abilities for each player and the possibility of being eliminated. It's actually a better game with the updates. But we kept on using the old character names out of habit; even though the new character "Jack Mustard" is supposed to be a former football player, for instance, we kept calling him "Colonel Mustard" anyway.

Clue is not a fun game for two people. But when you get a larger group of people, the information becomes disseminated completely enough between a lot of people, and passed around parsimoniously enough, that the dynamic of the game becomes engaging and enjoyable. Tracking the questions and answers, without knowing for sure why different people are wrong, is where the real enjoyment comes from. The new game keeps that dynamic while injecting a larger degree of luck as well as methods to neutralize bad luck or to underline good luck.

It's also a good choice for us to not play Scrabble. Too competitive.

Weekend Tiebraker

The Wife and I played five Scrabble games this weekend. The tiebreaker went like this, with seven-letter words earning the bonus highlighted:

Her		Him
swivel	38	carouse	22
starting	68	airfield	63
hoaxed	27	we, weaning	79
dirtiest	66	affect	28
phobia	54	at, anomaly	77
equine	37	razes, affects	43
rev	18	globules	78
jump, ja, my	31	sky	20
drop	21	gluon	7
mint	6	E, I, O	-3

End score: The Wife 379, Transplanted Lawyer 414

Normally, you'd think 379 points would be enough to win even a two-person game. But I got extraordinarily lucky and got not one but four long words and that really helps out. And fortunately for me, only once did I open up the triple word score to The Wife in a way that she could really capitalize on it (phobia) and I kept on getting good opportunities. In fact, if you look at the running count, you'll see that the lead went back and forth between us the entire game, until "globules."

I still think The Wife is better at this than me. Even when I jump out to an early lead, she finds a way to sneak up on me and even in a game like this, she didn't lose by all that much in relative terms. But sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good.

Return Of The Saturday Morning Cuss-Outs

That's right. The Wife and I risked the happiness of our marriage once again and pulled out the Scrabble set last night and played again for breakfast again this morning.

For two games, I was all over it. 7-letter words, triple bonuses, clever combinations. "Jazz" with a double-cross and the "Z" on a triple-letter score (yes, you have to use a blank) turns out to be nearly as good as a 7-letter drop. And leaving a zero-point "Z" on the edge of the board minimizes the risk of opening up the triple-word score tile for your opponent.

But the last game I couldn't get anything. Either I'd fried my brain out on previous games or it was just crappy, crappy draws. I had to resort to an exchange of tiles. The Wife decimated me, by nearly a hundred points.

Cribbage

I'm beginning to regret suggesting to The Wife that we pass the time by playing cribbage.

We were looking for a good two-person game to play together and most of the card games we know are best with three, four, or five players.

I'm usually really good at Trivial Pursuit, so The Wife gets discouraged with that about three-quarters the way through a game -- usually after I've assembled my entire "pie" and I'm trying to roll the exact right number needed to land in the middle of the board to get the winning question.

Our Scrabble games turn in to marathons because we both have to spend about ten minutes per turn contemplating every possible combination to find the best possible move. (Anagrams have never come naturally to me.)

So I thought, "Hey, how about cribbage?" The Wife said she'd give it a try and we got a cheap cribbage set from the store.

We had to figure out the rules online; it had been years since I played cribbage last and didn't remember much about the game other than you wanted cards that add up to 15 and 31. The rules that came with the set were clear as mud. I thought "pone" was an abbreviation for "player one." But I think we got it figured out and we've been playing ever since.

And The Wife has been kicking my ass. I'm looking with envy at the Washington Nationals' win-loss record. We've played a dozen games over the last two weeks, and I've one one of them. Seriously, I'm batting .083.

Maybe The Wife is some sort of a cribbage savant. She doesn't always see what's in her hand right away but somehow she seems to have an instinct for what to put in the crib and what to keep. And somehow, the cards seem to break her way much more often than they break my way.

Now, after seeing an online cribbage game, I'm not sure we're scoring things correctly. Particularly runs. But I don't think it would matter, since we're using the same scoring system for the both of us and The Wife just gets good cards consistently. I tend to get more points than her in play, but that only counts for so much and having good hands counts for a lot more.

This is why I don't gamble in places like Las Vegas all that much anymore. When it comes to games involving an element of pure chance -- throwing dice, getting dealt good cards -- it seems to me I often have very bad luck. I have decent skills, but when there is an element of luck thrown in to the mix, much more often than not, I find myself on the bad end of things. The longest part of a Trivial Pursuit game with me is after I get all of the pieces of the pie and I have to land on an exact spot. The laws of probability say that I should make that roll one time in six. But it usually takes me about twenty tries before I get it just right and can win. Oh, sometimes I get some good luck, but the average hand is bad. I do what I can with them and I have managed to keep a lot of our games competitive.

You can help, Readers. Point me to a good set of cribbage rules, one that explains things in plain English. Point me to somewhere that will give me strategies for how to build cribs better. Because I don't mind a game that The Wife wins about half the time and I lose about half the time. But 1-11 is simply discouraging.

Thanksgiving Scrabble Score

The Wife			TL
Fortune	76		enough	16
torque	30		torqued, beady	39
diviner, en, or	17		hoax	28
coaxal	15		ooze	33
streaker	89		bovine	22
muddiest	84		zoning, or	34
rhyme	14		wife, me	24
steeple, er	62		plaid, as, it, de	34
jan, jut, tor	23		owl, or, we, la	20
vie	10		sati, is	10
cooze	16		baa	10
	-5
	431			270

Dude. She kicked my ass. And she made the word "cooze."

Bad Attitude Scrabble

I admit it -- when I get several bad hands in a row in Scrabble, my attitude deteriorates. One hand is just bad luck. Several hands in a row is really bad luck and it leaves me feeling as though I don't have a chance to catch up. It doesn't help that this usually coincides with The Wife getting several seven- and eight-letter words in a row, racing so far ahead of me it seems I can never catch up.

This morning's marathon Scrabble game (these can last three hours or more as one or both of us searches through seven vowels trying to find a word, any word) saw me come back from behind about halfway through the game. It's satisfying to me to have had a chance to catch up and made the most of it; but The Wife was getting a series of bad hands, which gave her the bad attitude. I certainly understand; I've been there myself.

Here's how it worked out today:

TL			The Wife
48	zeros	48	68	greeting	68
18	trumped	66	31	spooky, greetings	99
30	growl	96	22	jog	121
28	he, healed, ed	124	24	jab	145
5	ague	129	18	fetid	163
32	ye, zit, red, yite*	161	22	mail, me	185
30	waive	191	21	wart	206
43	mails, squid	234	28	squids, rose	234
26	ibex	260	11	crum	245
14	caned	274	18	oxen, lo, de	263
22	ovoid, or, io, yo	296	7	pit	270
10	hit	306	10	fan	280
10	nab	316	9	ant	289
6	lime	322	5	deer	294
2	li	324	-2		292

Today, The Wife blames me for challenging her on the two-letter hook word "de" which appears in the instruction inset as an official Scrabble word, but which does not appear in either the physical** or the online dictionary as a stand-alone English word. I relented and let her make her play anyway (her tenth move above). I disagree and I still think that "de" is not a permissible Scrabble word.

But what gets me worried is that after a game of Scrabble, one or the other of us is usually in a bad mood. And these games take hours and hours out of our mornings because we're both quite competitive about the game.

So I wonder if we should continue our tradition of Saturday morning Scrabble. We can't seem to do it without one of us getting bitter and upset.

* A yite is a yellow finch that frequents England and northern France. And yes, I got lucky with "squids" and "ibex." A lot of animals in play this morning.
** An aside: our physical dictionary is quite odd. The publication date is 1989, but the map next to the entry for "Dead Sea" shows what is today the West Bank as part of Jordan and puts what is today Egypt in the U.A.R. Israel severed the West Bank from Jordanian control in 1967, and Egypt withdrew from the U.A.R. in 1971.