So I love Words with Friends, which is basically Scrabble. (It's actually tons better than the official Scrabble app, which I no longer use.) I have this friend, Jasethain, who is a podcast listener, who has become one of my scrabble-buddies. We regularly have at least one game of it going all the time.
He's also from Australia. I find this incredibly cool. It feels weirdly magical and futuristic to me to have a regular scrabble pal on the other side of the world.
He's a pretty good player, and he's beat me several times. He's tenacious. We're very friendly to one another, and often chat in our games too. Sometimes, I get a really good play against him.
Here's a great one I got Monday.
I know those 7-letter-high-score plays (called "bingos" by scrabble nerds like myself) are devastating.
Even more elusive and demoralizing is the coveted triple-triple, where you play a bingo that, leveraging already played tiles, makes a word big enough to hit two triple-word scores at the same time. (I've done it exactly once in my life.) That gives you nine times whatever the natural score of the word is, plus the fifty point bonus. But I digress.
One of the things that makes Jasethain fun to play against is that he takes stuff like this in stride, and will often rally back after plays like this, sometimes with a bingo of his own.
I'm excited to see how this game works out.
(Oh if you want to play too, my WwF name is "Mako Allen" - let's play!)