St. Jacobs Scrabble

Mark and I spent the weekend in St. Jacobs at the farmers’ market and shopping in the stores that were all made up for Christmas. We were there a year ago at this time. I bought a few small gifts for family members and colleagues. On Saturday night we played three games of Scrabble and I won all of them. Here is the bingo breakdown:

One week ago I got away with a phony bingo, and this time it was Mark’s turn. OUTBLEEd sounded plausible, especially when compared to many of the other words prefixed by OUT-.

My most lucrative play was the 95-point RUMPOTS which landed on the bottom TWS row. I hesitated a long time before playing it, because I was not confident in its validity and I do not like to play phonies against Mark whether they are bingos or otherwise. However I reasoned that a word like that wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t seen it somewhere, and I’d have been really upset with myself if I opted out of a potential 95-point play. Mark accepted it after a hold.

In our final game Mark played RIGHTERs, dropping the s onto the bottom TWS row. My rack was CEEIMSX, which forms CIMEXES yet I had nowhere to play it. I dropped it onto the bottom row, spelling CIMEXEs for 54 and keeping my S. While I definitely knew the word in its singular form, I was unsure of its plural. I even wrote cimex (es / -ces) on the back of my score sheet, reminding me to check it later. The only acceptable plural of CIMEX is CIMICES. As it was, I played a phony plural. Little did I know that I had a bingo through the second R in RIGHTERs: EXCIMERS. I know this word, as my eye doctor has a video on a continuous loop playing in his waiting room with him narrating the procedure behind laser vision correction surgery which uses an excimer laser. I admit that finding EXCIMERS from CIMEXES was probably not going to happen even if you told me that my rack played through an R. During this game I managed to play JAIL, from the lower left DLS to the left corner TWS for 78.