Not that I'm blaming Mary Beth, or Ben, or Dan, or any of my other "friends" who will eagerly forget their expensive liberal arts educations if it means a chance to play an "x" on a triple-letter-score space. The proverbial million monkeys banging away at random on typewriters might never write "Hamlet," but they could definitely come up with "koto." Words With Friends doesn't require you to learn anything, just to be persistent in your ignorance. There are all the lists of words you more or less need to memorize if you want to compete seriously (which I don't, by the way) - the two-letter words, the words that let you play a "q" without a "u," the words that consist entirely of vowels or consonants.īut those, at least, are things you learn. Scrabble, to be sure, is not without this kind of thing. There's no rule that says you have to know what a word means." (It's a Japanese instrument, by the way. "I don't know what it means," she volunteered. After my friend Mary Beth played "koto" on a triple word score, putting yet another game irremediably out of reach, I demanded a definition. And there's no shame in it, at least not for the people I play against. Indeed, it's the smart thing to do if you want to win. The effect is to remove any inhibition against playing random combinations of letters in the hopes that you might accidentally stumble on a recognized word. That is not an acceptable word." Then you get to try again - and again, and again, until you play a valid word. If you try to play a word that's not in the game's dictionary, you get an automatic reply: "Sorry. In Words With Friends, that never happens. In Scrabble, if your opponent plays something you don't think is a real word, you can challenge it, and if it's not in the dictionary, your opponent loses his turn. There are several noteworthy differences, but the crucial one has to do with challenges.
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