WHAT IS YOUR (WORD) GAME?

As I spend most of my time at home, I find myself much involved in various word games on the smartphone or the laptop computer.  Before the pandemic, I regularly played Lexulous, as a Facebook app, with the only player I can count in the environment, and Words With Friends.  Through one of those ads that kept bombarding the WWF interface, I checked out Scrabble Go and am kinda addicted to it.  I may be wrong but it seems the tiles in Scrabble Go are purposely distributed as really lousy, to nudged players toward using the diamonds collected, or worse (for the players) cough up real money to buy power-ups etc.  The ads are a pain, too, but I just used that down time to close my eyes briefly.  In the Scrabble Go world, good players seem to be difficult to come by.  For me, a good player is someone who moves regularly and not once a day, but also someone with an average point per move similar to mine.

At times, opponents in Scrabble Go took too long to move so I recently resorted to playing Duel games.  Instead of having all the time in the world for each move, there's a time limit, go pass that limit and you lose your turn.  The board is also smaller and the game is limited to five moves.  It sounds stressful and it is.  Not a great way to relax but I hate waiting.  I do wonder if the players are real people.  Words With Friends have that, computer players, somehow I find it unappealing.  I remember in the old days playing chess against computer opponents.  The first few levels the computer would take forever to move, or make quick, totally dumb moves.  Then at some point it got really smart and never make mistakes so there's just no point of playing.  Some of the opponents in Scrabble Go Duel are like that.  They are really awful and try to spell long words but miss the high-score tiles altogether.  Then there are "people" who use fancy words that are found only in some medical dictionaries.

I miss playing the crossword puzzles in the free newspaper Metro New York, which not long ago combined with the other free daily news, AM New York.  I actually play the puzzle in both papers but I prefer Metro's because the grids are larger, easier on these old eyes.  I was really happy that the combined newspaper kept the larger format, same puzzles.  Now that I'm stuck at home as a non-essential non-employee, I cannot pick up the newspaper any more.  Recently I went online and printed out the puzzle for that day, plus the day before.  Yeah, I'm an old-fashioned guy who still prefer pencil and paper.  When you do the puzzle interactively, it's too tempting to click some button to get the answer.  I have lots of pencils anyway.  I rescue them whenever I see one laying on the street.  Happy Word Playing!