Thursday, March 11, 2010

Word-building pleasure

It is amazing how much word-building pleasure is enhanced by technology. Our family’s favourite game of scrabble in olden days used to make me impatient whenever – which is most often – some of our ‘greedy’ members who refuse to settle for single-digit point words take many minutes racking their brains to find a word fetching maximum points in the given situation.
Besides, luck played a major role in our picking the tiles from the bag. Even in the downloaded version of scrabble I keep handy on the desktop (having been pushed to near solitude with only the computer as the partner in the game) I have the choice to exchange my letters where luck is inevitable. But in the live online game played with live partner is more thrilling. No chance for delays: the time allowed for each move is strictly 3 minutes.
While playing online we do not have to wait for the tiles to be exhausted for the end of the game showing the winner. Whichever player ( of the set of two) reaches 200 points first wins. This is logical too since whenever a player’s word touches the 8 crucial red squares on the 4 borders the board is swept clean and the game continues with a set of new letters allotted.
The best part is putting luck in the back seat: whenever a player’s word touches the yellow square he can ask for 2 letters of his choice. And when the word touches the blue square he can choose one letter. This is a great advantage in steering our way to success with clever, shrewd and quick planning. The scope for exchanging the letters is also there as in the older versions.
For crazy fans the joy of keeping on improving their rank according to the accumulating points can be thrilling and addicting. Lacking that ardour I am content with maintaining a decent score with alternating wins and losses.
I find this an interesting and pleasurable pastime to keep my grey cells a bit active and retard their aging process as best as I can. With increasing longevity old people with ample time in hand but failing physical stamina are searching for solace in TV mega serials, spiritual interests and idle worries! My choice is word games in computer.

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