Game-playing strategy

I have become hooked on "Scrabulous" on Facebook. It is a really fun game, and I love playing it. It is a nice distraction during the day. Having said that, it is a little disturbing to me what I've discovered to be the winning strategy at this game. I like forming beautiful, or interesting, or unexpected words; I just want to take the letters and form the best word possible. This is what I was doing when I first started playing, not paying much if any attention to whether the point-laden letters fell on triple-letter scores. I soon noticed, though, that this is not the way to win (duhhhhh). I guess this is why Scrabble has never been my favorite game. It bothers me that you can get 40 points for a dumb little word like "hub" if you land it on the right squares, and make sure it's forming other dumb little words next to adjacent words, like "uh" and "be," whereas you can form a lovely word like "pixie" and get 7 points.

Even more disturbing, you get rewarded for coming up with totally bizarre words that you probably never even heard of, which for some reason the Scrabulous dictionary recognizes as legitimate, like "kane" and "vaw"-- both of which I played recently. Now if this were REGULAR Scrabble, you couldn't pull it off, because you'd have to take a chance playing the word, and if someone checked you with the dictionary after you played the word and didn't find it, you'd lose your turn. But with Scrabulous, you just type "vaw" into the Scrabulous dictionary and see if it, for some bizarre reason, comes back a "valid" word. If it's judged "invalid," no harm done--you can just keep typing in other random assemblages of letters till you strike the jackpot.

It is just so ridiculous. I mean, what is "vaw"? What it makes me think of, as I told my Scrabulous partner Deb, is a hideous combination of "maw" and "vagina," which immediately makes me think of Grendel's mother or that huge evil spider in _Lord of the Rings_ or some other terrible misogynistic she-beast creation in literature, "opening her giant vaw and devouring our hero."

I just shouldn't have been able to score with "vaw." It makes me sad, but I have sold out my Scrabble purity. Ah well, I'll always have Boggle.