The search for the perfect word

The Facebook application Srabulous has gotten me thinking about putting letters together to make creative and obscure words. Scrabulous is just Scrabble, and when combined with Facebook it lets you challenge up to three friends at a time to a game with no proximity required.

Let me start with this: I don't like Scrabble. I'm much better with patterns, logic, and numbers than I am with words and letters, and when combined with my scientific mind and vocabulary, against most opponents I am woefully out of my league when playing Scrabble. In addition to being a naturally inferior Scrabble player, the time limit is a killer. When you put me on the spot, the chances that I'll come up with any word worth more than 8 points are remote.

Which I think is why I like Scrabulous a lot more than I do Scrabble. When it's my turn, and when I look at the board and don't see any possibilities, I don't have to put a word down right now. I don't even have to put a word down today. There's no limit to the number of times I can look at the board before I make my move, I can stall for a week (or a month) if I feel like it, and I can put the tiles on the board to see the number of points before I actually make my move. Plus, if I were the cheating type, I'm sure someone has written a program that would suggest all the words you could make with your letter. Like maybe this one. Or this one. I don't like to do that though; there's a limit to how much you can bend the rules of Scrabble and still call it Scrabble.

So anyway, with these thoughts of letters dancing in my brain, I find myself looking for the perfect word. If I draw an X or a Z, I usually like to sit on it for a while to make sure I make the best word possible. Of course that often comes back to bite me when I'm stuck with high scoring letters in my hand at the end of the game. Still, the challenge of working with such letters has produced words like fazed, zoning, axing, affixed, ablaze, and others. Words like this are naturally predisposed to score more points, and if you can work over a double or triple word then so much the better. Still, I'm amazed at the score of some of the other words I've seen.

An example is a word I was very proud of: JAW(S). Not just a great movie, it combines the valuable J (8) and reliable W (4) with the lowly but common A (1) and a blank tile, which should give a score of 13 points. However when I laid it on the board I was able to drop the J on a double letter and the blank tile (S) on a triple word, for an impressive 63 points.

On the very next word, my opponent responded with DEVIANT(S), using a blank tile himself, and while the V (4) was the highest scoring letter he was able to use all the letters in his hand, thus earning a bonus. That seemingly normal word earned hum 88 points.

Another interesting word was RENAILED, although only the D (2) was worth more than one point. With a double letter and double word, plus using all of my tiles, it gained me a heft 77 points.

I'm still waiting for the perfect combination of letters though, the one that's worth some 300 points. Something like QUIXOTIC. What a great word that is; it's worth a maximum of 306 points (according to this blog post). You'll notice that's not even the highest scoring of the 8 letter words (CHUTZPAH would get you a whopping 333 points).

So every time I see a Q or an X in my hand, I secretly hold out hope that the rest of the letters will magically appear, as well as an opportunity to use them. It's a false hope I know, the chances of that happening are slim (I could calculate it given the state of the game at any one time), but I can still hope, as quixotic as that hope may be.