The Wife and I played five Scrabble games this weekend. The tiebreaker went like this, with seven-letter words earning the bonus highlighted:
| Her | Him | ||
| swivel | 38 | carouse | 22 |
| starting | 68 | airfield | 63 |
| hoaxed | 27 | we, weaning | 79 |
| dirtiest | 66 | affect | 28 |
| phobia | 54 | at, anomaly | 77 |
| equine | 37 | razes, affects | 43 |
| rev | 18 | globules | 78 |
| jump, ja, my | 31 | sky | 20 |
| drop | 21 | gluon | 7 |
| mint | 6 | E, I, O | -3 |
End score: The Wife 379, Transplanted Lawyer 414
Normally, you’d think 379 points would be enough to win even a two-person game. But I got extraordinarily lucky and got not one but four long words and that really helps out. And fortunately for me, only once did I open up the triple word score to The Wife in a way that she could really capitalize on it (phobia) and I kept on getting good opportunities. In fact, if you look at the running count, you’ll see that the lead went back and forth between us the entire game, until “globules.”
I still think The Wife is better at this than me. Even when I jump out to an early lead, she finds a way to sneak up on me and even in a game like this, she didn’t lose by all that much in relative terms. But sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.
