WildWords is another crossword puzzle game that I own and enjoy
playing, and the official web page that describes the game in great
detail is at http://www.wildwords.us/ . I understand that you have a
much more prominent and popular crossword game to emulate as closely as
possible, but I wanted to throw the idea out there and find out what
the odds are that this could happen anytime in my lifetime. :-)
Here are the main differences between Scrabble and WildWords that
should help you give at least a halfway decent answer for my question...
Wildwords has a different tile distribution than Scrabble.
Players get a bonus of 40 points for playing a bingo in WildWords.
The playing board is still a 15x15 grid, but with a different
arrangement of premium squares and two new types of premiums squares
thrown in:
Lose 20 On Play -- using one of these squares to make your play
subtracts 20 points from the score for that play... this happens
after "double/triple letter/word" bonuses are figured in, but before
the bonus for playing a bingo if that's what your play was.
Turn To Wild -- if you lay a tile on one of these squares, the tile is
flipped over to the back side and it becomes a blank.
Blanks are used very differently in WildWords than in Scrabble. In
Scrabble, a blank can only represent one letter. In WildWords a blank
can represent one letter, or it can represent a long string of
letters. For example, in Scrabble Q?T only makes one legal word, QAT.
In WildWords, Q?T could represent any word from QAT to
QUARTERFINALIST. And if a blank that is already on the board is played
through to make a new word, it can represent a different letter or
string of letters for the new word. Using the blank this way makes
bingos happen much more often in WildWords and throws the game wide
open for much longer words than you see in a typical game of Scrabble.
I'd venture to say that there's practically no such thing as a
defensive, closed-board game of WildWords.
So tell me... how much of a pipe dream is it that Quackle could some
day be as good a player and analyzer of WildWords games as it currently
is for Scrabble games?
Dave Leonard
Tiler8 on ISC and JumbleTime.com
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