Mark and I played five games this past weekend and I won all of them. For the first time that I can remember–at least ever since I started posting about our games at my blog–I got away with a phony bingo. Here’s the bingo breakdown:
| Craig | Mark |
| BEgONIA (68) | SOAPiNG (79) |
| MEDIATED (89) | MiNTIEST (80) |
| ANURETIC (61) | MOtIVATE (70) |
| FUDGERS (82) * | rELATION (59) |
| CApSTONE (80) | |
| ROLaMITE (77) | |
| ADOPTIvE (83) | |
| PRESSRUN (70) | |
| INDENTS (78) |
* FUDGERS was the phony. I had the opening play and saw it immediately. I was aware of how long it took for FUDGY to become an acceptable word, so I knew of the derivatives of FUDGE. Yet to make it an agentive plural–to describe unscrupulous accountants, for example–didn’t seem much of a stretch in plausibility. In fact, Merriam-Webster likes it, yet gives it a different definition. I reason that casual games are the ones to take risks as there’s less at stake than at club or tournament games. And had I forgone playing FUDGERS, only to discover that it was acceptable, I would have been disappointed and moaning about it.
I played PRESSRUN on purpose, hoping to draw a challenge as I didn’t think Mark would question its anagram, SPURNERS (which also would have scored the same). Mark did in fact challenge it and I got an extra turn which scored 41, so in the end it was a 111-point play.
We each played non-bingos which scored major points: I played BOXY from the top right TWS to score 71 and ZEK for 62 and Mark played QUARTO, slotting the Q on the TLS and the entire word doubled for 70.