Facebook has a wonderful scrabble game which is, alas,
not available to those in America and Canada at this
time due to a copyright disagreement.
Those of us in the rest of the world have availed ourselves
of this feature, finding Scrabble on the Internet the ideal
way to play.
There are hundreds of games going on every hour of the day,
whether two, three or four person matches.
If you decide to play, here are a few errors you don't want
to make.
The most obvious mistake is to make your first play a
seven letter word.
Your opponent(s) have the option to press "End Game".
No points are awarded and the game does not count.
Exactly what benefit did you get out of "Enabler"?
If you've played with the person before, if one makes a 7
letter when the other can follow on, fine. But in Most
cases: "GAME OVER."
Until you've reached the third or so round, when the game
counts, I suggest you don't try to impress anyone.
This also bears true when your opponent isn't particularly
good and you decide to show off with "scrabble words" which
net you thirty plus points to his ten.
You will soon be playing by yourself.
When a game has reached the level where it "counts" a
disaffected player will put about 24 hours between plays.
Annoyed, they may come on simply to block access to triple
word/letter scores, so they are no longer playing Scrabble,
they are playing Squat.
If they stop short of annoyance at indifference, they just
don't play. Time passes and passes and eventually you can
press "Skip" so that they forfeit their turn and you can
play. Try doing that for the next ten/fifteen moves. Not
much fun is it to play by yourself?
On-Line Games have to be viewed through a different lens
than those you can touch and distinguished from the computer
solitaire genre.
When you are in a room with people and pick up a tile
and fit it onto the Board, that is a whole different
set of responses then when you are moving cyber tiles
onto a place on the screen.
In Real Life, you can't be thumbing through a dictionary
or trying out various combos on the board.
In Cyber, you can have two Scrabble dictionaries running
while you're moving tiles back and forth to get the best
possible score.
When you play with a machine, which has no feelings, it is
far different from a person whom you can insult.
Too many people have a difficulty in transition. They can
understand sitting around a table with people or sitting
alone in their room with the computer, but when an opponent
is not a machine character but a real person somewhere else
in the world, they don't know whether to play IRC Chat or
Doom.
This is evident in a game like Scrabble. Many players forget
their opponent is wetware and wind up with seven letter words
on empty boards, not understanding how the "computer" shut
them off.
