Think little

We like to say you can play this game thinking a little or thinking a lot. Today we scope out the decidedly little side, with a tip at the end for adjusting just how much “little” you want. We in fact tapped joyously randomly here and finished each of the three games below in less than 30 seconds, taking another half minute each to scroll through and highlight our words and Blu Yonder’s. We hammer out the play-by-play here with formed words in bold type. All videos below are in real time on an iOS simulator for video capture. Letter entry on actual devices tends to be on the order of twice as fast. Yep. Enjoy. [Update, December 2022: We’ve replaced the videos with grabbed still shots as multiple videos may not play well with a single post in RSS feeds.]

There’s actually not too much to describe as far as strategy. Our only sensibility was to mix it up and find empty bubbles to tap, totally ignoring what letters were coming up. No calculated risk, no sly anticipation. Just playing by feel to see a space and use it. A lot less suspenseful than usual. In these games, it often takes a while for any words to appear at all. We’re actually pretty democratically dispersing letters, so none are even adjacent until halfway through. But after getting a toe in the door, things do gel toward the end.

Obviously, lots of words we made were shorter than normal, but our three final scores here were all around 70. The average over several minutes of poke-about games for this article was perhaps in the 30s, always netting at least double digits. Spell the Beans, being less tightly vacuum-packed, would give lower results overall than the bubbles. We did have a high of 164 for the session (see bottom). Blu Yonder in this second game certainly grabbed a ton of points at 319, averaging 235 over the tripleheader. Its finger wasn’t fluttering like ours. Our longest words for these three games were dorter, retrod (which is sort of a retrodden dorter) and stolen (which was gotten by just if lazy means).

As usual, we got credit for things we’d never have known were words, though we definitely don’t thrill to the arcane as such. To wit, tewit (a lapwing or plover bird). We’d rather play it wise and not devote time to memorizing the pedantic when common words will do. But we do hope these games show how you really don’t have to think to have some fun. There’s room for every kind of play. Take the no-look challenge yourself sometime. We even sometimes start off half a game that way and then start scheming. It’s a whole new kind of challenge.

 Blu Yonder gameplay randomness Spell the Coffee tips