Emma's+online+Card+or+Board+Game

For my multiple player card or board game, I have chosen to play online Scrabble through the website pogo.com. I was excited to have the chance to play Scrabble for my homework because I have been addicted to the game for years. I grew up playing it with my family, I have it downloaded on my phone and my friends and I play Scrabble or Bananagrams here at school all the time. I consider myself a strong player when playing offline, so I'm excited to see how my skills will match up to others that I will play online.

So far, this game has become addicting. The way the site is set up is that they have a number of rooms for beginners, intermediate and advanced. My first time playing I joined the beginner room to see what I was up against. A random person was selected to play against me and we ended up talking in the chat that is available. It turns out he was from Wisconsin and we chatted throughout the game and even ended up playing another game together. I am proud to say, I won my first game :)

I noticed the more you play, you begin to rack up tokens and the people who have been playing the longest have the most tokens. Also, as a beginner, your avatar is very generic (see above) and I couldn't figure out how to change it. The next game I played, I played against someone who had the exact same avatar as me, which was a little confusing when I was looking at the scoreboards. However, I did still manage to win.



My roommates and I have always liked to play word games such as Text Twist, Scrabble and Bananagrams when we are bored. When I told my roommate about this project, she was excited about it and wanted to play with me. I told her how to sign up and we began playing many games back and forth. Sometimes we played when we were not together, and sometimes we played when we were together and had nothing else to do. Instead of talking to each other as we usually do online, through AIM, we would talk through the chatrooms. It has proven to be a great way to keep us entertained throughout the day. Since I have more experience with this than she does, I usually win, but lately she has been catching up and the distance between our scores have become a lot smaller. Here are some screen shots of our games.



I noticed that my friend was able to change her avatar to represent her a bit better, but I decided mine was close enough so I didn't bother changing it. However, as we started advancing to the intermediate levels, my avatar automatically changed clothes and in the last game I played, my avatar was wearing different clothes and had different hair. The game gives you the option to pick your gender, skin color and hair color and the more points you rack up, the more options you have to customize.

Another thing we noticed while playing is that the computer does not automatically correct words that our not real. So if either one of us posted a word that wasn't real, if the other one didn't challenge it than the person who posted it would get the points. We had a lot of slip ups in the beginning as we did not realize that, but now that we've figured it out we will challenge the word. Also, if you don't make a word in the allotted 2 minutes the computer gives you, it will give your opponent the option to extend your time. When my friend is losing, she will usually not extend my time so we will have some back and forths with this. It is fun playing with my friend because its a good way to get us both involved in the online activity but I still like to play with random people to play people with all different skill levels.

I also noticed something with censorship...the computer will censor if you use a swear or anything that they may take as one such as "damn". A few times they have censored really random words like "me too", "I still do" so I'm not exactly sure of the logic behind that but it is interesting to look at our conversations after with all the censored material.

So I played a game against a random opponent at the advanced level and it was interesting to see the game played from this perspective. It was a good back and forth, and I was winning throughout most of my game but then towards the end my opponent used all 7 letters which in this game is "BINGO!" and gets you a 100 points, something that I did not know before. It was also interesting to see the type of words used. There was many words my opponent used that I had never seen before such as "loggiest" and "brae" so I didn't know whether to challenge him or to assume he had a bigger vocab. He also had many more tokens than me (over a million), which shows he has definitely been playing for longer. Our final board my best word score...62 points!

You can actually win cash prizes from playing Scrabble! The more games you play, the more tokens you get and if you have enough tokens, you can exchange them for drawing tickets. There is a monthly drawing of up to $1000 and a weekly drawing of $250 and while I know it is so unlikely to actually win, I had to try and exchanged 300 of my tokens for drawing tickets. Fingers crossed.

I just figured out that there are chat forums for each of the games on the website where people can post questions, criticisms or comments. The first post I saw was: "Scrabble players are rude" which I have to say I agree with for the most part...no one ever really wants to talk to me on here. Most people are really into just playing the game, so its nice when I actually find an opponent that wants to chat. I like that there are the forums though -- people are helpful for the most part, makes it feel more like a gaming community than just a website where you can play games.

I finally got a Bingo (when you use all 7 letters at once). I've played against some pretty good players on the expert and masters levels and I've seen other people get bingo but I've finally got one of my own. The word was *RAVELLED* :)