The favourite game at casa az.
Nog and I play almost daily, which I find very generous of him since he wins maybe once every two or three months. Though the past couple of days he seems to be on a roll. He’s still only won one game so far this weekend (first since I think last March or April) but the scores are getting uncomfortably closer and he is also coming up with far too many seven-letter words . . . most annoying. Lately I’ve barely been able to cheese him! A nod to Terry Pratchett for that one – a cheesing is like a creaming only it hurts more.
The score point difference between a creaming and a cheesing is shown below, based on how many points The Winner (ie. me 😉 ) wins by.
- basic win: under 50 points
- creaming: 50-99 points
- cheesing: 100-149 points
- creamcheesing: 150-199 points
- cheesewhizzing: more than 200 points
Had to come up with category five awhile ago – you can probably figure out why.
casa azahar 
I don’t think I’ve ever cheesewhizzed K. I think the greatest point difference for either of us has been a cheesing… and I did get those two triple-word-scores that one time, which led to my creamcheesing him.
Poor Noggin. He’s certainly a good sport, agreeing to a match when he knows he’s likely to be creamcheesed or worse.
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Won two of the last three, though 🙂 including that 113 points in one turn.
Anyhow, it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part – or so they tell me.
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Yeah well, I reckon that’s your lot for the next six months – hope you enjoyed it. 😛
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Hi az 🙂
The creamcheesing had me rofl’ing… 🙂
It’s been a while since I’ve been playing any scrabble – the kids took it up recently, though. Once, when I get into a wee bit more sedate pace of life, I pledge do scrabble more!
Oh, and I like your small images to top each entry 🙂
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Hi SGV!
Nice to see you here. To be honest, we’ve had no time to play any scrabble here recently as we’ve had zoomer visiting – usual programming will resume this weekend I’m sure. 😉
Aren’t the small pics funny? I put one up for ‘the drawing board’ post, since I was using that one there (cyber cat). And then I thought it would be fun to have images for all the posts and went around looking for suitable pics. Good ol’ Google images …
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There was actually a bit of a somewhat sorta-kinda-semi-pseudo-quasi plan to play three-man scrabble after lunch … but it seems that the Andalusian HEAT along with far too much wine put the kibosh on that one.
So instead Nog is semi-comatose on the sofa pretending to read and zoomer is cursing most heartily at the laptop keyboard (as if it’s the keyboard’s fault!). 😀
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Wow, you guys are way out of my league. I’ve never had a seven letter play.
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A just-barely-made-it creamcheesing tonight at casa az. Final score 351-201. Yay! 😀
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Today’s score was 308-306! Which is actually a much more fun and exciting game than a creamcheesing . . . well, as long as *I’m* the one who ends up with 308 😉
Have been challenged by friends from New York who will be here visiting next week – eek!
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The visiting friends showed up last night with A NEW SCRABBLE GAME! 🙂
My old one is about 30 years old and, since starting the lunchtime games with Nog a couple of years ago, the board has become quite gross – covered with food and wine stains. Though I have to say I prefer the older tiles, which have turned a lovely colour after so many years – the new tiles look ‘too new’.
I’d use the old tiles with the new board but, unfortunately, we are missing a B and an I.
Anyhow, it’ll be interesting to play four-man scrabble for a change.
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Well, it was fun playing four-man scrabble and I even took a photo of everyone at the table but it came out all blurry. 😕
Anyhow – a question.
Remember the ‘too new’ looking tiles? Well, it seems there is another issue with them. As they are just clean bare untreated wood they seem to stain very easily – which is a bit of a problem as Nog and I mostly play scrabble at lunchtime while we’re eating.
The old tiles were already so ‘well-seasoned’ by the time I met Nog that they were more or less protected from buttery or sauce-smudged fingers (not mine I hasten to add 😉 ).
So I was thinking of putting some sort of waxy/oily wood protector on the new tiles – any suggestions?
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It’s no joke … those new tiles are getting rather marked up now.
Shall we just dip them all in olive oil? And rub it in?
Almost seems that we might as well since most of the stains they are getting are from us playing while we’re eating and olive oil tends to be a regular fixture in our meals.
Help?
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Gaaaa! Just six points short of a cheesewhizzing yesterday! Final score was:
az – 454
Nog – 260
Got two seven letter words and so was feeling quite pleased with myself. 🙂
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Disaster has struck! Yesterday we went out and bought some ‘oak’ varnish to paint our scrabble tiles and make them impervious to olive oil stains – but the cure seems to have been worse than the ‘disease’.
They look totally shitty now and the varnish is all uneven (well, you try it! painting those eensy surfaces with fingers getting all sticky) and now I think we should have just rubbed them all with olive oil instead.
No turning back now though … one side of the tiles has been done and of course we have no turpentine in the house (duh) so gotta do the other sides before the brush turns to stone. Ended up having to scrub the varnish off my fingers with nail polish remover … gaaaaaa!
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This one has to be recorded!
Just sat down to a lovely meal of prawn hoisin with basmati rice … and a scrabble game.
I started off with a seven-letter word: veneers. And then that fucker Nog also got a seven-letter add-on word: jettison! We’re both hysterical – this has never happened before!
I’m still ahead though … 😉
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Oooh scrabble, very exciting! I cheese whizzed my dad last week (doesn’t that sound rude?), 480 to 220. 😀 (And only one seven!)
How do you feel about QI?
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Wassat? Another word game?
Actually, Nog and I are looking for some more good word games to use with the weekend ‘intensive English’ groups we’re organising. So any suggestions would be appreciated.
Oh, and I only ended up creaming Nog last night (which also sounds a bit rude). The score was 234 to 155. Just one more point and I’d have cheesed the fucker!
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No, the word “qi”. It’s in the bigger dictionaries but a lot of people I play against think it is cheating. 🙂
There are two excellent word games I like to play other than Scrabble. The first is Boggle, where you have 16 dice with letters on and a board with 4×4 slots for the dice to go in with a lid. You shake the dice up in the board with the lid on and they settle into the slots giving you a 4×4 array of letters. You have to make as many words as you can with these letters, where you can move one letter horizontally, vertically or diagonally at a time, and each letter only used once.
The other one is called Anagram (although there are variant names for it). You have letter tiles or cards which are initially all face down. Each go you turn another one face up. At any point, if you can see a word using the face up tiles you shout it out, take the tiles needed to make it from the middle and arrange them to form your word. The person with the most/longest words at the end wins. But there’s a twist. If you can use the letters of someone else’s word, along with some additional letters from the middle, you can pinch their word to make your longer one.
I also had a less good game of scrabble last night. There were two turns where I had a 7 letter word with the letters I had been given, but we were playing such a tight, defensive game that there was nowhere I could put them down. 😦
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Today’s score was 394 to 259 … no need to guess who got the higher score. 😉
Ah okay, the famous ‘qi’. Yeah, we use it all the time. We also like ‘xi’. And we also allow the use of chemical symbols. What the hell.
I’ve heard if Boggle before, though I’ve never seen it myself, nor played it.
Oh dear, the old seven-letter-word-nowhere-to-put-it scenario. That happens all the time to us (well, I think Nog might just be faking it at times to get some sympathy – as if! 😉 ). But it’s extremely frustrating when it happens.
Still haven’t done the second varnish coat on the new scrabble tiles, mostly because they look totally hideous and I can’t imagine a second coat making them look any better. What a mistake that was!
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Ohohoho, I can’t help myself, I have to boast about tonight’s cheese whizzing. Last go, I have 7 letters including one blank, no more letters left in the bag, full board with no obvious places to go. I suddenly see…
Rigatoni.
Also making or, ago and awe, over a double word score, using all my letters for…
83 points!
Final score 456.
I thank you. 😀
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Ooooo – well done! Do you find it hard to get people to play with you?
Yesterday was very frustrating as I got seven letter words three times and couldn’t put them down! Twice because there was no place to put them and the third time that you-know-what blocked my spot. Still won though. 🙂
Also had a nice creamcheesing the other day, 401-232. It’s quite admirable the way Nog keeps trying to play well even when I’m 150 points ahead.
Meanwhile, we are trying to rescue the botched new tiles by soaking them in olive oil. We’re hoping that when we take them out and polish them with a cloth the oil will ‘even out’ the icky varnish mess.
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Yes, it is difficult. I have found a way to adjust though. If I’m playing against someone good I’ll put some effort into thinking of a good word, if I’m playing against someone less good I’ll spend less time thinking about each word. Evens it out a bit.
I think it might be time to give up on those tiles, they sound like they’re beyond repair…
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No way! Not giving up on the tiles! 🙂
You really play differently with different people? I totally go for it every time. And when I am occasionally ripped to pieces by a better opponent it’s almost fun (since it almost never happens). But quite a bit of fruity language ends up happening… 😉
I only hold back when I’m playing a scrabble game with my students – obviously I won’t hit them with qi. I can only use words that I know they also know.
But Nog is fair game. Neither of us understand this. I reckon he has way more vocabulary than I do, but what he lacks is imagination. So sometimes I’ll totally invent a word, check it in the dictionary – and find out it actually exists! Yay, I win!
Also, I’m more of a cutthroat player than he is, as in I will almost never leave a triple word option open.
Last Christmas Nog bought me a lovely chess board which we have used only once. I don’t know how to play chess well, or even properly, but I totally whipped his sorry butt the one time we played.
Instinct?
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I won’t actually not put down a good word if I’ve seen it, but I won’t think for as long if I’m against someone not so good. It’s not fair (or much fun) if they’re getting 5-20 each go and you’re getting 15-50 each go. It’s a sort of handicap – they’re playing scrabble and I’m playing speed scrabble.
I like to invent words too, but it often backfires on me if I’m challenged and they’re not there. You have to be cut-throat though. In one particularly hard fought battle where my opponent had made the mistake of not specifying beforehand what the reference dictionary was going to be, I insisted on going online to check my word on the complete OED (it was there and I won).
I played chess against my girlfriend just once – it was a terrible experience. And not only because she won. 😉 Neither of us had any idea what we were doing and most of our moves were quite random (at least mine were). I think my problem with chess is that you have to study hard to be good at it. Scrabble, boggle and so on you can just pick up and play.
Having said that, I have been getting into backgammon recently (including reading a short book on strategy). It’s quite a good game to play because whenever you win/lose you can claim it was luck (even though it is largely a skill game). You tried it?
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For me there is no fun playing scrabble unless I’m totally going for it. Even Nog will spend ten minutes on a word, getting quite frustrated, etc. That’s why some of our scrabble games can last for three days – we never rush each other. The fun is in getting *just the right* word. And sometimes you only see new options the next day. It’s fun.
I remember playing chess with an ex-boyfriend of mine about 15 years ago and he was totally annoyed when I won – said it was beginners luck. Except I kept winning… not always but enough to totally piss him off. Kind of like when I beat him at snooker first time off (and fell totally in love with snooker!).
But for me chess is a game that I have to get totally absorbed into and imagine all the possible moves. It’s weird. If I can’t shut out ‘the rest of the world’ I can’t play chess at all.
I also love backgammon. It’s a game of half -luck half-skill that is intriguing to me. The first half of the game is mostly luck, then what you do after comes down to skill – I do like it a lot. Nog and I have played a few times. I have a really nice board that I’ve had for ages and should try to get Nog to play more backgammon with me.
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Today was sooooooooo sweet… *evil grin*
We both started off with almost all vowels for about the first half dozen turns – and I kept telling Nog this did not bode well for the last half of the game when there would be no vowels left.
Anyhow, it was a slow tedious game with totally pathetic scores on both sides and it even looked like Nog was going to win there for awhile. 😯
But the final score was:
az – 257
Nog – 256
*does victory dance while Nog does the washing up!* 🙂
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Nice one! 🙂
If I get a rubbish set of letters early I tend to change, whereas later on I’m much more likely to just try to find something (unless I’m a long way ahead). My game yesterday was a bit annoying, we boxed ourselves in and there was nowhere to go. Slow and frustrating. I won though. 🙂
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I love those one-point wins. Even if I’m the loser!
I don’t spend less time thinking of words, nor do I rush, depending on who I’m playing with. When K and I first started playing, I was still following my mother’s rules (she apparently used to cheat, when playing her own children, no big surprise! :lol:). It took him some time to convince me I earned points for adding on to an existing word, for playing a word less than five letters long, or for hitting two triple-word scores. I did that once- K had played “sake”, and I added four letters to it, spelling “forsaken” and hitting two triple-word scores. I did nearly creamcheese him that game.
Would you be interested in playing Boggle, az? K and I have three Boggle sets and only use two of them. We’d be happy to share the third- we’ve not even opened the packaging yet.
We enjoy playing Boggle when we have some down time, but not the several hours required for a decent Scrabble game- as each “match” is three minutes long, we can play several “matches” in an hour or so, when the whole afternoon isn’t free.
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Wow – it would be great to try out Boggle, PC. Nog and I had been thinking of ordering one as it sounds like a good word game that we could also play with our more advanced students, especially during the intensive weekend classes we are hoping to set up soon. It sounds especially good for that if ‘matches’ don’t take very long. I’ll reply further to the email you sent me. Thanks! 🙂
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“If I get a rubbish set of letters early I tend to change”
I used to do that but often found I ended up with something just as bad and had missed a turn as a result. Though sometimes if I’m going first and have nothing but vowels and a Q, I’ll forfeit my turn and hope Nog puts up something I can add to.
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Definitely get Boggle, it’s a great game.
I used to play it at lectures. 🙂
(Not using a board with dice of course, that would have been noticed. I wrote a computer program to generate boards and printed a couple out before the lecture.)
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“I used to play it at lectures”
Careful! You don’t know who might be reading this and might decide you should give your grant back… 😉
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Today was sweet. 🙂
First I made ‘quaint’ with the q on a triple letter score. The next three turns I made:
acquaint
reacquaint
reacquaints
With the s making the word ‘say’ going down.
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Btw, the score for that last game was:
az – 443
Nog – 183
😎
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I know it’s pretty crass to dig out the scrabble boasting thread, but the game I just finished has to get a mention. After 5 goes I had managed two seven letter words and a triple word score for a net total of 261 points! After five goes! 🙂
It was a rocking game actually, especially the first few goes as my opponent was also racking up points at an amazing rate. The first two words of the game were plunder and pargeter (you’ll need to dig out a really big dictionary to find that word), and a few goes later cognate. After that it calmed down a bit and I ended up the 442:343 winner.
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Feh … big deal. Wasn’t even a cheesing. 😛
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Combined score though! That’s the real measure of a game! 😉
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Ah, I was just teasing you. A most impressive score (and I had to look up pargeter – must remember that one). And two 7-letter words, plus a triple word, in five goes is pretty amazing. It’s a good thing your opponent was also racking up the points to keep things interesting.
Which reminds me that Nog & I haven’t played scrabble in ages. The translation job has really cut into our ‘spare time’ during the day. Maybe we’ll get one in soon.
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Yeah, you need to have a fair bit of spare time to fit in a game of scrabble. I guess you and nog could do your technique of playing one game over a whole day or a few days, having an occasional go here or there.
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Yeah, I think what put the kibosh on those games was when we got the new adsl/tv set-up, as the router is now sitting on top of the dvd player (which is where we used to keep the scrabble board mid-game) and we haven’t found another place for it yet.
Nice to be reminded about that though – I’m sure that with a bit of (eep!) tidying up we could clear another scrabble-board shaped space in our livingroom.
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It should be possible to play an over-the-weekend game, but during the week the main table has to be cleared for az to teach.
Slightly off-topic, but I think Dan might like this “explanation” of an inverse correlation that showed up in the translation work that I’m doing:
“that is to say, that whichever smaller was the greater FEV1 was the lactoferrina liberation, and vice versa”
For English readers of a certain age the words Picts and Scots will probably spring to mind.
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Yes, TV is evil it’s true! Stops you from playing scrabble – very sad indeed.
nog, I think that almost counts as poetry. I’m sure it has political and religious undertones too. The suggestion of a revolution ‘lactoferrina liberation’ and the idealistic ‘whichever smaller was the greater’ (didn’t Jesus say something like this?). The ‘vice versa’ means they are against the ‘vice’ (aka moral and political corruption) of the ruling class. Oh yes, that’s definitely a political statement, hiding in poetry, hiding in… whatever it was that that came from. 🙂
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TV doesn’t stop us from playing scrabble. But the new router on top of the dvd player has taken over the mid-game scrabble board place.
Trust me, there’s plenty of space we could make for the ‘scrabble board in repose’ if we weren’t so busy being lazy. Also, I doubt that Nog is about to tidy up a spot for it – unless he has some seriously masochistic tendencies he hasn’t told me about yet.
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Thought you’d like it. There’s a post on my blog about translation, both for general discussion and such gems as the one above.
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Ah, that was a sweet …
Didn’t win by much but we were down to the last few tiles, both of us had 325 points and it was my turn …
I went out on a triple word using the J from another word.
*victory dance*
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Total cheesewhizzing here at casa az tonight!
508 to 239!!!
(Nog is sulking… 😛 )
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Been awhile since my last cheesewhizzing … fabulous finish with a seven letter word leaving Nog holding a ‘j’.
449 to 215
Love this game. 🙂
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Fantastic stuff az! You should post pics of your final boards. 🙂
I haven’t been playing much recently.
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That’s a good idea, Dan. 💡
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