Scrabble Challenge News

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2007/04/03: A glitch caused the computer player to miss its play a few turns ago, making the computation of efficiency and projected score impossible. Fixed now.

2006/03/08: The new word list (OWL2) is now in effect.

2006/03/01: The Scrabble Challenge will switch to using the updated tournament word list (OWL2) when the next game begins. The new 2-letter words are KI, QI, ZA, OI and FE. More information is available at the Scrabble Association's website here. Prepare yourself!

2005/08/09: The dictionary has been expanded to include words up to 15 letters in length.

2005/05/02: The server on which my website resides melted down this afternoon, and had to be restored from backup. As a result, the Scrabble Challenge has probably rewound by a few turns. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2005/01/03: There was a brief span of downtime on Monday night, due to maintenance being performed by my hosting service. All seems back to normal now. Let me know if you encounter any more problems.

2004/12/07: Judging from my logs and my e-mail, I can now replace the last five news items with one pronouncement: at last, the Scrabble Challenge and IE6 get along!

Hallelujah!

2004/12/02: There's one significant factor the Scrabble Challenge does not take into account: leave. Unlike a skilled Scrabble player, it does not pay attention to what tiles are left on the rack when rating the "goodness" of a play. Unfortunately, this means the Challenge tends to serve up a fair number of racks that look like AUUIEVW, bingos happen less often than they might, and the final scores are lower than they could be. Should this change? Would players prefer their plays be rated based on a combination of score and leave, or do you like it the way it is?

Mail me and let me know what you think.

2004/11/30: The Scrabble Challenge has moved to http://ironphoenix.org/scrabble/, which I expect to be its permanent home. Please update your bookmarks and links.

Registration has been implemented in order to avoid username conflicts, and is required if you want to be listed in the game history. The default user is "Anonymous". To login or register, click on the "Change" button next to username. As before, your username is recorded using cookies so you shouldn't have to login more than once (make sure cookies are enabled in your web browser). To get proper credit in the "running totals" table, you should register the same name you've been using throughout the current game.

Contact me (at my new address) if you run into any problems with the revamped Scrabble Challenge.

The name "Scrabble" is a Registered Trademark of Milton Bradley Company, a division of Hasbro, Inc. (US and Canada) and of J. W. Spear & Sons plc., Enfield, Mddx (UK and elsewhere). This site is not affiliated with either.