Have the nuggets gone live? :D I just noticed that seem to have maxed my winnings despite not having actually played the live games much at all today.

Edit: Just seen the update in the newspost, awesome. ^^

i think there might be something off about the way the boards are generated? i just got a board with 9 I’s on it, five of them in a long line. there was also a “Q” without a U, which means it’s impossible to use ;u;

anyone else having similar troubles with the generated letters? or is it just a crummy board? it seems like this happens to at least one letter with every board i play though…

edit: my next one had 10 “E"s and 2 Q’s, neither of which was next to a U. orz

Letter distribution has not changed since it was fixed on February 18th.

What changed on February 18th was that we realized that we were selecting letters with replacement (e.g. pulling a letter out of a bag, writing it down, and replacing it before selecting the next letter) when what we meant to be doing was selecting letters without replacement (e.g. pulling letters out of a bag). We have carefully examined the code and, since this fix on February 18th, it does exactly what we want it to do :)

So yeah, it hasn’t changed, and will be unlikely to.

Since the letters won’t be redistributed/rebalanced for phonotactics, can there be a way to reroll a board? It’s not fun having to wait five minutes to try again after getting this:

Squee! My favorite game!

It doesn’t take the word Mit (as in baseball mit)

Well. That was a good game. O.o

Whoah Sallin! Awesome! :D

Thank you for explaining, Glitch.
Rather than forcing people to make a bad board work (19 words is still only 40-60 nuggets, a fraction of what can be made with the other games), or in addition to the timer,  I’d personally rather see increased rewards for working with what’s there. Either a point system that weights “tricky” words more heavily (think the point distribution on Scrabble tiles), or conversely, reduced rewards for “easy” words - for example less points if the word ends in “er”, or “es” or begins with “re”. Either of those would increase the value of bad boards, and reduce the point gap between “good” and “bad” boards (and make the highscore list more about skill rather then who has the most time to reroll a good board.) Or maybe it would ust make people look for different things when they start a new game. I dunno.

On the other hand, my fun has been increased since realizing you can play the other games while the Spellstones timer counts down, so I really have no complaints. :)

Thanks! :D I got really lucky with a bunch of root words and suffixes, and a spattering of well-placed ‘s’ tiles (plurals are a godsend, haha).

The root words really help - things like ail, oil, one and ear (which can also be used as words themselves!), and if you get a good set of letters around the first one you can just rattle off words really quickly. Tear, fear, rear, near, sear, etc. If you manage to catch an s it doubles the wordcount around that root and increases the multiplier even further. If the end of the root is also near a ‘-ed’ or an ‘-ing’, jackpot.

The three-letter words are also really important. Sure, they do nothing for the multiplier - but they give you more to multiply. ^^ Back to ‘ear’ again - if the arrangement’s right, you can also get ‘are’ and ‘era’. Just keep looking for the tiny words, and sometimes you’ll find that they lead into bigger ones.

I seem to have turned this into a ‘these are my game tips’ post, haha, I guess I’ll continue.

Don’t be afraid to stop for a few minutes. Go look at something that isn’t your board for a bit if you’re finding yourself stuck - you’ll come back and suddenly find connections you hadn’t seen before.

Plurals. Plurals plurals plurals plurals plurals. You need them. Praise those ‘s’ tiles when you see them because they are amazing and you can’t hit the really big scores without them.

If you’re not sure it’s a word, try it anyway! Sometimes connecting random letters will give you more points and you’ll end up learning something too! It might also lead you to see new combinations. ‘Strope isn’t a word, but rope and trope and strop and port and ports are!’ etc. XD Not to mention if/how the word’s looped in on itself: you might find pose, poser, rose, ore, roe, pot, pots, pert, rot, rots, pest, rest, test, tor, tors, sore, sort, toe, toes, top, pet, pets or prose. ;D

Don’t just read left-to-right or up-to-down. Roll your eyes around the board in different directions.

Uhh, that’s all I can think of for now, haha. Hope it helps some people? ^^

As for the easier/harder word score adjustment…
The problem with changing scores based on certain letter combinations is how do you tell if a word is easier or not? The word might end in ‘er’, but if that word is something like… aquifer or calligrapher, how do you quantify the bonuses and penalties? ^^ It’s only 5 minutes, haha.

@Cynderbark

There’s a link on the previous page to the dictionary list, and you can suggest words for it. ^^

But a few words seem to have been denied even if they’re real words? owo

A ‘hinny’ is the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse. Like a mule, but with the parents reversed, like ligers/tigons. ^^

A pooka is a mythological shapeshifting creature. It has a bunch of spelling variations like these things often do but pooka’s the one I see most often.

A bap is a kind soft bread roll. ^^

As for the Naan being a foreign word - it isn’t? It’s the standard English spelling for that particular kind of flatbread.

Bot/bots might make you think instantly of a shortened ‘robot’, which would make it incorrect, but a bot is actually the name for the larvae of the botfly (and what the fly is obiously named for, haha). Nasty things.

Sorry, I’m a little bit obsessed with this, haha.

There are many (and will be many more) “real” words that won’t make it into the dictionary. For example, hajj, juju, juku, fozy, zebu, puja and hadj are all real words, as far as Scrabble is concerned. As English is a language which does not have an official dictionary (which is why there is such a thing as an “official Scrabble dictionary”), there’s a certain subjectivity in which words go in and which don’t. For each submitted word that isn’t already in the dictionary we’re using, we make the decision of whether we feel it should be, and accept or reject it accordingly :)

We’re rejecting foreign words that you hear often in English to describe the foreign entity (e.g. naan, pho, koi, etc) because you could make that case for virtually any foreign word.

It does seem a little bit arbitrary with the agent suffixes. Idler and riddler are okay while waddler and skirter aren’t. (people can waddle or skirt just as easily as they can riddle or idle).

(though I was thinking of “bot” as a verb - e.g. “If you bot on mycena cave, you will be banned” - that’s not really a reduction of “robot” because nobody would say “You can’t robot on Mycena cave…” or “Robotting here is banned” Hmmm…. though now that I think about it, “to bot” as a verb sort of means “to use a robot to complete a task” so… maybe?)

edit: I hope that’s not too whiney. I mean, I’m happy being on the board at all so ^^

edit 2: I actually thought “naan” was rejected for the same reason “toupe” (‘fake hairpiece’) was rejected - technically they’re spelled “na’an” and “toupé”, so they’re impossible to spell correctly in the game.

is this… supposed to happen? o.O because i’ve been getting a lot of boards like this, with a bunch of the same letter grouped together.

<_< Touche.

:(
Thanks for letting me know, I’ll try to get to the bottom of this

We seem to be managing an average of just under 1 state error per day… Heresy being today’s lucky winner :\
I think I will need to spend April mostly working on infrastructure and stuff. Bleh.

I’m sorry for your lost nuggets :(