Thursday Night Scrabble


Mark came over last night and stayed for dinner and three games. I won all of them, and some interesting words were played. I averaged 447 and Mark 348. Here is the bingo breakdown:

CraigMark
SAMOyED (78)STILTED (76)
WATERMAN (78)STEALERS (60)
FEINTEd (71)STATELY (78)
CONAtIVE (63)
SOLARIA (68)
rEGENTAL (131)

SAMOyED was an underlap making four additional words with SAMO. DAMOSEl would also have allowed me the same four-word underlap. In this game I won 418-412, only after I made sure that Mark couldn’t overtake me after I played ZONED for 30. He went out with VAGUEr, taking him to 402 + 10 from me.

In our final game I was way ahead and held great tiles and the blank. The board was open and I decided to open it some more, playing ZIG where the G was in third position on the bottom row. My new rack was AEELNT? and while I saw the eights that began with G easily, I still took the time to look for a triple-triple. The 3 × 3 anagram of GELATiNE and GALENiTE is LEGATiNE, yet that word slots an E at the end, making it easier to play a bingo on top of it. One should always look for a better play, even if one can score 131. I continued to look. It is harder for me to find bingos when I use the blank as the first letter, but in this case I found the suffix -AL first and then it appeared to me: rEGENTAL, which Mark challenged.

All of Mark’s bingos started with ST-.

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