my compulsion to suck at wordsmith
Recently, Jennifer asked me whether I’d seen that TiVo had Connect Four. I said I hadn’t, and thought that was really weird. A few days later, I went digging around and found it; it’s actually called Skull and Crossbones, probably for some stupid copyright reason. I wasn’t really interested in Connect Four, but there were some other things I liked: SameGame, a podcast reader, traffic and weather reports, and probably some other things I can’t think of now. There was also a game called Wordsmith, which was listed with Scrabble piece as its icon.
Basically, you get a grid of letters. You can pick letters from the top row, which causes the rest of that file to shift up. You form words, which are scored based on letter value (like Scrabble) and the length of the word. It’s a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, I have a deep-seated urge to do poorly at this game. I keep trying to make words that are good words, but not good scorers. “Noir” is not worth many points. Neither is “resistor.” Just this morning, I threw away many letters trying to set up “duterium,” which was a mistake for two reasons. For one, I knew it wouldn’t get many points, as it was mostly low-scoring letters. For another, the word is spelled “deuterium.”