I love this game

I had one of my rare 3-1 nights at the club. My first game was against this guy Steve, who plays a sickly devastating closed board game, which as Alceste well knows, is the best defense against my bingo-dependent game. I lost by 155 points. Which made me sad. I was then pitted against a newbie, which made me happy because I handily crushed her with little resistence. She challenged basinets -- when I bingeod on the triple line. Grin. Hmm...I know it's good, but now that I look at it in print, I guess it does look funny. Okay, I take back my hysterical laughter inside.
Then I had to play. Niki. She was my very first opponent at the club ever. She's super nice and friendly-- and I'm not just saying that because people at the club know about my blog now. But she is also very competitive. Plus, she has always beaten me. You obviously know where this story is going.



I bingoed on her early - QUARTOS (seriously, how do I ever lose at Scrabble when I can play a word like quartos. Man, if it weren't for luck in Scrabble, I'd win every time.) She drew both blanks and bingoed back with serener to take the lead. I had a z in my rack (which I drew after the quartos move) and there were two places to play it two ways on a double letter square, but I didn't have an a. And then I became obsessed with getting the damn A. I musta wasted three turns trying for it, so she took an even more substantial lead, but I finally got my gitdanged A and played Azo and Za, to pull back into twenty points of her. We went on like this for a while, until she played unflat -- which I stupidly didn't challenge -- and jumped out to a 36 point lead. I had saiines on my rack, in the end game. There was an open t on th etriple line at the bottom, so I played off one of my i's knowing that I could bingo with whatever I drew next. But I hadn't been tracking and there were NO TILES LEFT IN THE BAG. Muzzerfocker.
Now I had six tiles left, she used the T to play total and I was down by 33, with no possibility to bingo out.
I wanted to cry.
Instead, I sat there pouting for five minutes until I decided to add ise to total and hit the triple on the other side with totalise, for 24 points. She laughed at my desperation play AND CHALLENGED! IT WAS GOOD! And it turns out I miscalculated and the play was actually worth 27 points! Now I was within 6 -- and she lost a turn. All I had to do now was go out and I could win!
And i said so. Out loud.
"I know what you have, you can't go out," fired back.
I stared at my remaining tiles of san. And pretty much as soon as she finished that sentence I saw the open w.
"Yes, I can!!"
And I played swan. And I won. BY 3 points. SO SICK.
My last game was against a charming British fellow. The first time we played, he was just off the boat and still playing sowpods words, so I won just by challenging them off. But he's a very very good player, so I was not looking forward to playing him now that he'd gotten the hang of OWL.
Our game started off being very closed:
Crap...thought I had a picture. Anyway, I did one of my cute sandwich played where I played faith right under his word, making like six words for 40 points. He came back with sick sandwich move of his own -- under that!
Then I bingoed with sextain, but I had been fishing for it for a while, so he had a 100 point lead on me, so that barely brought me back...I bingoed again with triages to take the lead. In the last play of the game he bingoed with renotice through a c on the triple line, putting him ahead by 16 points. I was all...crap. And was about to cry, when he was like "um...it's the last play, if I were you I'd challenge."
"Oh yeah....challenge," I said sheepishly.
It was no good.
I went out and won the game pretty handily.