The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

While, due to some problems with the game, I recently switched to Ruzzle, I still have a handful of long-time opponents I play in Scramble With Friends. While I've made mention of a power-up called a mega-freeze, which players can pay actual money for and provides them an extra minute in a round, it appears a new such option has become available for players. At the end of each and every round now, a pop-up appears on the screen, which says, "Get 20 seconds of extra play," for, you guessed it, money. This is one reason I made the switch to Ruzzle. The game doesn't ask for money to give me or my opponent an unfair advantage. The game is void of power-ups, which can also give one player a significant advantage over the other. It also tends to play much smoother than its Zynga counterpart as well. It would really be quite something to see competitive games played in the manner Zynga offers. In baseball, a team would be afforded a 4th out in an inning if they paid some e...

If anyone out there, like me, loves word games (Boggle in particular) and has had issues with Zynga's Scramble With Friends, I'd give Ruzzle a gander. It's very similar to Scramble With Friends, in that it's just like the game Boggle. Unlike Scramble With Friends, however, which allows players to use power-ups and gives the option of paying money for an extra minute of time in a round, Ruzzle doesn't offer such things. This is a good thing in my mind, because it seemed kind of unfair for some players to use a different number of power-ups than their opponents - especially if they doled out money for an extra minute's time in a round. In Ruzzle, it's comprised of three two-minute rounds, where two opponents, void of power-ups, attempt to find the most words on the grid. Anyway, as long time readers of mine will know - I love word games - so, given the issues I've reported playing Scramble With Friends, I thought I'd pass this word around. If you ha...

As regular, long-time readers of this blog will know, I've had some issues with regard to playing Zynga word games on my Android phone through Facebook over the past month or two - most notably, Words With Friends (Scrabble) and Scramble With Friends (Boggle). Well, it appears as if the games are working again, for now anyway. Words With Friends was going pretty slowly, though, so slowly, I decided to delete it and just play it from my computer until the problems are fully fixed. Scramble With Friends, meanwhile, appears to be going slightly more slowly than when I was playing through my Google account, but to this point anyway, it's playable.  Anyway, I just thought I'd update Zynga word-game players out there whom were having similar problems as I was. It appears as if the games are not in ideal playing shape yet, but things are heading in the right direction again. Hopefully that trend will continue and the games will run smoothly again before too terribly long.

I shouldn't be surprised by recent headlines concerning Zynga's mounting problems. Between layoffs, a lawsuit, and unsatisfied customers, the online games provider seems to facing an increasingly steeper hill by the day. As a Zynga customer myself, I've about had it with them and am seriously contemplating taking my services elsewhere, at least until (if) things get straightened out there. There are only two Zynga games I play anymore - Words With Friends (Scrabble) and Scramble With Friends (Boggle). When first playing these games, I would have graded them both with a perfect five out of five stars. However, the more I have played these games, the more flaws I have observed, particularly in Scramble With Friends. Unlike in Words With Friends, in Scramble With Friends every player is provided 15 tokens. Each game costs 1 token. A person may use that token for one power-up, a second token for another power-up, and three more tokens for a third power-up (in each and eve...

Well, I don't know if anyone else has had similar problems as I have had with regard to the Zynga word game Scramble With Friends (Boggle), but I had been unable to access my account through Facebook as I had been able to do up until a few days ago. I don't know if it was just my phone or a host of others had run into similar problems. If anyone else has been experiencing similar problems, I'd recommend setting up another account through a different e-mail address and starting over again. I set up a new account through my gmail address and everything seems to be working fine again for some odd reason. Hopefully I'll be able to access my other account at some point, but for the time being, this will do I suppose. Anyway, I thought I'd spread the word, just in case other Scramble With Friends players were unable to access their accounts in recent days. If any regular players would like to square off against me, you may find me at the username TheRoz81.

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 th...

I love Scrabble. I play Words With Friends on Facebook quite frequently and am quite good - I'd say that I win about 8 of every 10 games I play. However, while I think a person may need some intelligence to play the game well, I don't think as some seem to that those whom are good at this game are the brightest of the bright. To consistently win at Scrabble, one needs the following: A decent vocabulary, a fairly good memory, the ability to strategize and luck. The more one plays Scrabble, the more "Scrabble words" they're going to learn - you know, those words you see in the game of Scrabble that you don't see anywhere else, such as: Xi, xu, za, jo, qi, qat, zoea, etc. One may hold a significant advantage over their opponent initially when it comes to overall vocabulary, however, the more they play - so long as the opponent has a decent memory, the more that vocabulary gap will lessen. At this point, vocabulary plays a smaller factor in the outcomes of the...