Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Word Twist

Excuse me while I diktat a message to my peepbo.

Explanation: So, I am now addicted to a game on Facebook called Word Twist. Word Twist gives you six or seven letters and you have to make as many words as possible out of those letters in a given amount of time. You play against other players, getting points as follows:

3 letter word: 1 point
4 letter word: 2 points
5 letter word: 4 points
6 letter word: 6 points
7 letter word: 9 points

So, the larger the word, the more beneficial it is to your score. But that's not all. There is also a 25 point bonus if you find the longest possible word from the given letters. So, if you have six letters, you actually get 31 points per six letter word. Furthermore, each six letter puzzle forms at least one six-letter word. Same goes for the seven letter puzzles and seven letter words.

Because of this 25-point bonus, the big word is clearly the most important word to your score, because in many cases it's worth more than all of the other words combined. It is essential to figure out the big word in order to win... which takes me to my complaint.

The other day, I got the following letters: PPEBEO. The game tells you there are 6 three letter words (which I got) and 3 four letter words (which I got) along with the one six letter word. With two minutes total, I found all nine of the small words in 1:08, leaving me 52 seconds to find the big word. After floundering for the first 30 seconds, I spent the final 20 or so seconds randomly trying letter combinations, thinking it might be some obscure word I didn't know. Sure enough, when time ran out, I was presented with "PEEPBO" as the word I missed.

This led to a moment of puzzlement, followed by quite an obscenity-riddled tirade before I finally decided to utilize the post-game recap feature where you can click on words to see their definitions. For instance, say you missed FILO, you could look at their definition and see that it means "first in, last out" - a useful feature in a game where their dictionary makes all the difference. I looked up PEEPBO to find out that it means "no definition found." Very useful to know, in case I ever come across the word in the future. In fact, after scouring the internet, the best I could find was that it might be some sort of derivative of "peek-a-boo." Luckily, my opponent did not get the word either, so it didn't influence the final score of the game.

Last night, my wife destroyed me in a game because she guessed "DIKTAT" and I did not. Interestingly, after looking up the definition, it also appears to be a synonym of PEEPBO, meaning "no definition found." Also useful to know.

Anyway, I'm done with their definitions of words. I'm just making my own up from now on.

Diktation complete. Please send this message to my peepbo and copy me on it. Thanks.

2 comments:

Willie Y said...

I was thinking that it a derivative of Little Boo Peep.

Anonymous said...

LMAO....I just went through the EXACT same scenrio as you, while playing WordTwist on Facebook. Like you, I was skeptical that it was actually a word (for the first time ever in this game!), so I just HAD to look it up. I thought you'd think it was funny that YOUR blog is now one of the first 5 Google search results for the word PEEPBO haha! I'm still pi$$ed though! lol
-Bobbi-Jo Ferris in North Bay, ON