A short word about longer words

Longer words are basically worth exponentially more in Spell the Beans, independent of what letters you use. One way to increase your score is to add an S or two to the end of an already long word. For words ending in E, D or R sometimes work the same way. Today we’ll look at a 531-point effort that made copious use of that. Formed words in bold.

Spell the Beans 531 points A

Things spilled nicely, and the points piled up as lots of Es, Rs, and Ds appeared. Of course basic E-ending words like tile and blade benefitted from added Rs or Ds. But words like land, bland, pill, till, and tiller also lit up the screen by tacking on ED or ER. In the end, one R went mostly unused this time.

Spell the Beans 531 points B

Works both ways

Besides being common word endings, ER and ED in the opposite direction start off plenty of words as RE and DE. To wit, relit. Not so prolific in this case, but rest assured, putting DE and RE before verbs ups the score pretty often. In this game, we got a little help from a lucky double-L as well.

Spell the Beans 531 points C

Tuck rule

One more tip: You may have noticed longer words in the left-hand list don’t extend beyond the colored area of the column, appearing “tucked.” That’s to avoid overlapping letters on bubbles or beans. To show the full word, drag your finger up or down in the bean/spill area as you normally would to highlight words in the list. When you reach the longer word, it will be highlighted and extend beyond the colored area.

Spell the Beans 531 points D

In this case, we demonstrated that with slandered and gendered. Below, in a different game, we highlighted deforested as made by Blu Yonder. Here, DE and ED worked both ways at once. Words are highlighted in the bubbles and beans in a color suited to each theme, in this instance a salmon color, and above, red.

Spell the Beans showing highlighted word fully extended

By contrast, dragging your finger in the word list itself simply scrolls the list without highlighting. Dragging outside the list highlights words. By the way, these were screen shots from an iPhone 13 Pro. As such, the blank area at top is where the notch normally is, and corners that are rounded on the device look different here. The previous post shows what it really looks like on notched devices.

 

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