Big boards: shattered expectations

[Naboka]

Anyone else experienced the shattered expectations of seeing a board with eye-popping possibilities based soley on the number of words available?


And then you open the board and....

and...

and...

WTF! where are the words?

Just played a board with close to 300 UR words, so expected it to be a piece of cake.

Nope.

The next game had 163 UR words, so, with hesitant expectations...

Crash!

Burn!

Smouldering ruins.

Two games in a row.

With such high expectations for each.

Sigh! Surely I'm not the only one who experiences this.

ps: one of the time-consumers on certain boards is wasting time with POSSIBILITES. The nearly 300 UR word board above had -ings. Finding words ending in -ings can produce big points--or sometimes none at all. -ings automatically adds 8 points to UR words. That's 2 points a letter. So a 6 letter 10 point word can become 10 letters/18 points. Or a common word like boring (6/6) becomes 7/12 where adding the s adds 6 points. For one letter! Sweet pickings.

The second board accepted suprachoroidial which just begs for suprachoroid. Nope. Three times I tried to type it and got nothing. (-dial is just one of those wonder-if elements.)

Oh well, if everything here were predictable some of fun would evaporate. Things that are tooooo easy can quickly become boring.

Failure keeps it interesting. Keeps us humble.

[BoredInTheCar]

I am familiar with that phenomenon. A related situation is where there are indeed an endless supply of words, yet they seem to add up to a listless score.

I have lowered my expectations for productive boards that contain lots of words, but lack interesting letters. Combos like star/rats/tsar/tars/arts/rast and live/evil/veil/vile may add up to a lot of words ... but not so many points.

[Naboka]

I am familiar with that phenomenon. A related situation is where there are indeed an endless supply of words, yet they seem to add up to a listless score.

I have lowered my expectations for productive boards that contain lots of words, but lack interesting letters. Combos like star/rats/tsar/tars/arts/rast and live/evil/veil/vile may add up to a lot of words ... but not so many points.

That's why I moved away from common words. It just sooooo tedious doing them over and over. Unfortunately, it's getting to that point with UR words, so I've been focusing more on the longer words. My scores are taking a hit, but the word finds are more interesting and gratifying.

One day, I'll just get bored with the whole thing and seek another challenge.

[dannyb]

For me ,it is like a moth to a flame. Not just big boards, but big boards that have been played quite a bit, with moderate results. I'll say, "Let me see about this." And then I see. I can't seem to dump the game. I know I can find a large scoring combinations of letters, but almost never do. Then I look for the next similar board. And so it goes as any good Tralfamadorian would say.

[bwt1213]

I have battered myself against such boards. I see a board and a good player has the top score -- a good 300 points under their average. Sometimes, if you press ctrl a few times before you play a word so the board you see is rotated from what everyone else has played, you can jump over everyone. But most of the time the great abundance of words are all cattywonkers, curled eldrichly or widdershins, or cross-stitched from letter to letter and anyhow you're not going to see them. No one will. Yeah, they're there. But the only way you'd ever see them is if you had enough time to prize them out. Alas, two minutes or even three is never going to be enough. The only real solution is a version of the game where you have a "shot clock" of ten or fifteen seconds to find a valid word, and if you failed then the game is over and your score will be tallied. I'd like to see that game, but of course none of the records set there would be comparable to the current game version. Golly, though, if you were as methodical as Naboka and as knowledgeable, I think that the better players might well find every word in a puzzle often before the shot clock ended the game. That game would be like the Boggle version of Jeopardy, or even like chess -- where fans would watch the game unfold in real time and critique every play. (Strategy: save a "bank" of easy plays to use later in the game when time gets tight, and start looking for the really difficult words at the start. Or?)

[BoredInTheCar]

press ctrl a few times before you play a word so the board you see is rotated from what everyone else has played, you can jump over everyone.

I have wondered if anyone else tries that, when the high score is from a very accomplished player yet seems low compared to the word count.

I don't know if it helps, but I doubt it hurts.