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Another quick gripe about Scramble With Friends

One reason why I prefer the word-game Boggle over Scrabble is the fact every player has the same letters to work with, so no player is at an advantage or disadvantage on that front. In Scrabble, while the better player will win more times than not, it's quite common for a player to be at either a significant advantage or disadvantage due to the letters he or she has to play with during the course of a game.

Well, I just found out the exception to this rule is with regard to the Challenge feature on the Zynga game Scramble With Friends (Boggle). About once a week, players can take part in a four-part challenge and whomever racks up the most points by the end of the challenge will be rewarded with some additional tokens in which to play more games.

For part one of this challenge, my grid looked like this:

U X D J
K R K C
F P R R
J O D O

Yeah, try forming 30 words with that grid - I dare you! Due to this grid, I was hardly able to muster any points and was shocked to see the almost overwhelmingly larger scores. I then retried the grid for whatever reason and noticed a few changes, meaning the grid was compiled of entirely different letters. In other words, not all of the players had the same grid to work with. This was disappointing, because it places certain players at an advantage and others at a disadvantage just based on the luck of the draw. How can a winner be determined in the game of Boggle if each player has different letters on their grids? If we're going to play games like that, why not have competitive bowlers face-off at separate bowling alleys? One can bowl at the alley where the league is played every week and the other can bowl inside their own mansion.

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