Winding down Scrabble

Starting right before the new year, I got all wound up playing Scrabble on the iPhone with various Facebook friends. I was having lots of fun. I was spinning up to always be playing 10 games at a time. (All asynchronously, often with moves a day or two apart.) I of course had a whole little system worked out so that whenever I dropped below ten games, I’d start a new game inviting friends to a new game based on a randomized system where people who I knew were Scrabble players had greater odds of being invited than people who were not, and people who I’d never invited had better odds than people who I had invited before, but hadn’t played. I kept graphs. It was fun.

Somewhere along the line though, Facebook made it so that Scrabble couldn’t send notifications any more. This made it so it was harder for people to know when their turns were. (At least people actually playing on Facebook, the iPhone still has push notifications for this.) It made it harder for me to scan and see who was playing and who was forfeiting (so as to change the weights on the probabilities I was using to determine who to invite.) It just generally made it harder to do what I was doing. I could still do it, but it was a bigger pain than before.

So I decided a week or two ago to just wind down my playing. I’ll still accept requests for games from anybody who wants to play, but I won’t be sending out any new requests. So my number of games is slowly winding down. From the ten I was keeping it at I’m now down to five. Unless I get unexpected invites, those will slowly wind down and I’ll have none left.

Oh well, it was fun for awhile!