My mum came over to our house this morning for her regular Saturday visit and gaming session. After a cup of tea and a chat, Grandma, Maddie and I went out to the table on the back deck to play some games.The first game we played was Money Money Money. We played this game for the first time last week and we all enjoyed it. In this game players draw plastic coins of four different colours from a bag and stack them on top of each other in coloured stacks in front of them. Each turn you must guess if the coin you will draw will be higher or lower than the top coin of the matching coloured stack. If you guess correct you go again, if you guess incorrectly you put the coin back and your turn ends. There are some 'wild' coins that change things a bit by telling you to draw more coins, lose coins or exchange coins. It's a guessing game using probability as a guide.
Maddie had several excellent guessing rounds to go on to take the win with 37 coins, with Grandma 2nd on 17 coins and me 3rd on 14 coins. In the photo above you can see how the winner is determined by stacking all four coloured stacks on top of each other.
Grandma and I then decided to play a game of Scrabble together. This was my third game of Scrabble in my adult life and the first since I'd finished reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. I was eager to see if I could get a bingo; that's laying all 7 tiles down on one's turn to get a bonus 50 points on top of the word score.Mum drew both blanks and got most of the high-scoring tiles like Z, J, X and Q. Her highest scoring word was 27 points and my highest was 24 points. At one stage I had GLOATER sitting on my rack but no place to lay it down. That would have been a cool first-ever bingo. Alas, it was not to be.
It felt a little weird when I laid down VAGINA in front of my mum, but she appreciated the finding of the word. Maddie was watching Grandma's rack and suggested POO (which she'd only learnt to spell the night before) and Grandma accommodatingly laid it down. Maddie was quite chuffed she'd been able to find a word.
I feel my anagramming skill is developing and I was able to make several 5 or 6 letter words, it's just that they weren't necessarily on good scoring squares. Mum skillfully worked off my longer words with shorter ones but in valuable scoring squares. We also used the challenge rule this time with both of us having one successful challenge each. Neither of us were left with any tiles at the end of the game. It was a very close game. Mum won on 252 points and I came 2nd on 247 points.
3 comments:
What word did you make instead of GLOATER? I can't figure it out.
I think the only other bingo was LEGATOR which I didn't see at the time. I ended up frustratingly playing a couple of tiles off somewhere (can't remember where)in the hope of picking up a couple of handy letters to play another long word in a high-scoring spot on the next turn. Unfortunately Mum grabbed the spot I was going to play it on so I ended up using part of it on LODGER. Still learning and trying to pick up on errors I'm making. I thought I had a pretty good vocabulary and word knowledge until I read 'Word Freak'. Now I feel inadequate. :-)
You should have just played LODGE and made your mum connect to the end of it if she wanted the Triple Word Score. You had the R in hand - if she hadn't take the space, you were set to take the TWS.
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