five by five by five

[lifeofmendel]

recently the creator of the facebook application Prolific created a variant where you can play on a 5x5 board with a five letter minimum.

yeah, guess where all of my spare computer time has been lately.

it's funny too, because even moreso than regular 5x5, i can be very hot or cold, either winning against some decent opponents or losing

Comments

[shandrew]

Min 5 sounds like fun. I've been playing Scramble which only recently got min 5, but only in games where you explicitly challenge friends (i.e. not in the general rooms). I think I prefer the gameplay in Scramble because it highlights the letters that you're typing, and there's no penalty for bad words. Scramble tells you immediately whether a word is valid or not, so it's a good vehicle for learning new words.

[lifeofmendel]

i like penalty for bad words because i think it actually increases my ability to learn words more than less and forces me to recognize words more than patterns. There are some fast typing pattern whiz kids that play penalty off and just throw out lots of garbage without ever having to learn what is valid and what isn't. If i don't get penalized for trying 'teaed' or 'ryot' and would get the same score regardless, it doesn't matter if i learn it or not.

(There is a penalty off option in prolific too, though, so if you like that you can use it.)

i also like prolific better because of the scoring and the fact that you're not ever playing more than 8 people at once, and you can somewhat choose who you're playing against and have direct interaction with them - it's a more intimate setting. Because of prolific, i've met some fantastic people and now consider them friends, the sort that i'd like to meet and hang out with.

[shandrew]

ok, after playing it a bit more, i've decided that i like prolific better too :)