Scrabble

Just played a game of Scrabble against some random dude on the Facebook with a two-minute limit on turns, and it was super fun. The time limit really forces you to keep your mind on the game and actually changes the way you play quite a bit.

In a more slow-paced game you have time to consider options and be a bit more strategic about how you play, you can make the most of every tile, particularly S's and blanks. When you've got that clock ticking away, you've got to make a move and sometimes there's just no time to consider all the alternatives.

Here's the board as it stood at the end of the game.

I'm now going to go through a few highlights of the game and talk about how I felt the game was going at each point.

I got off to a pretty good start there, but you can see that I skipped a turn when I got flustered and let the timer get away from me. At that point I felt like the game had turned against me, and that wasn't helped by Lee's 35 point play immediately afterwards.

I almost gave up when Lee played "za" and "avo", because he blocked the exact spot I was counting on playing my tiles, but then I spotted another place and got the bingo anyway. It was at this point I felt the game turning back in my favour.

Feeling more comfortable I took the opportunity to relax a bit and simultaneously kept the pressure on Lee by making moves as quickly as I could, giving him as little time to think as possible while doing all my thinking during his turn. Some of my moves here are not great, and I could probably have done quite a bit better, but I felt I gained more by keeping things moving as quickly as possible, since I had a reasonable lead.

And here's where my tactic really paid off, with Lee making a completely unforced error in failing to make a move within the time limit.

And that was it, game over.