As regular readers of ye old blog of whall know, I recent switched from Blackberry 8700C to iPhone 3GS.  There are some major drawbacks from that move (which I will explain in more detail with a dedicated post) but there are some awesome benefits.  One of the benefits is Scramble.

Scramble is a free iPhone app/game that I learned about at pool last Wednesday night.  I love word games, word finds and word play.  I can’t believe how addictive this game is. 

Equally unbelievable is how relatively bad I am.

When I first started this game, I think I earned 8 points.  On the next game, I doubled my score to 16.  I thought I was pretty good until I connected to facebook and saw some of my friends’ scores:

(I’ve blurred out the names to protect the awesome. 
However, some of you may recognize the avatars)

374 points?!??!?!  HOLY COW.  Congrats, my BFF BF.

So far, I’ve gotten a high score of 116 points, and that wasn’t until I figured out I can change the grid to 5×5 instead of 4×4.  This makes a lot more words available, even if it does make selecting the letters a little harder when the screen is rotated.

The simple idea behind this game is: you’re given a grid of letters, and you drag your finger across letters to make words.  The longer the word, the more score you get.  You keep getting as many words as you can in the 2- or 3-minute time limit.

As with most addictive things in life like golf or blogging, there are aspects that are frustrating.  The frustration adds to the allure, counter-intuitive as that may seem.  Four of these frustration factors are

1. Seeing other people do better than me (aka, the “competitive factor“)
2. Seeing simple words I missed (aka, the “embarassment factor“)
3. Having the time run out before picking all the words I already see (aka, the “anxious factor“)
4. Learning that the English language has some stupid made-up words, probably just for this stupid game wait let me play it again because I can get that word next time and what do you mean utui is a word?!?!?! (aka, the “sore loser factor“)

I’ve resorted to blindly trying words in the hopes that they are real words, and whaddyaknow – it works half the time.  Not only is TEA a word, but so is TAE!  I’m guessing possession and memorization of the Scrabble Dictionary would be a good thing for this game. Knowing the magic 3-letter list is probably a good thing as well, and when there’s an “S” nearby, you pretty much double all the words around it.

I think there should be levels of the game – one version where you just need to know that a word exists, but another where you need to know what a word means.   And then I’d win because this would be my board:

(bonus points: what total score
could you get from above board?)

Then, I found out there’s an online Facebook version of Scramble, and you don’t even need the iPhone!  I played it a couple of times and it took a little getting used to dragging the mouse around the letters instead of my finger, but it gets easy enough soon enough.  I still prefer the iPhone version for now.

I also like how the game likes to point out the obvious

Do you scramble?