dear FF, what is a "bot"?!
I haven't attempted to play any games online but I do like Boggle and Scrabble. I'm interested in the strategies of the latter - how DO you block players, and what does it mean to pass? My mother is the one I play Scrabble with the most, and she and I rarely keep score - we play gentlewomen's Scrabble - "O, I got the Q" - "Well, I have a U, would you like it?"!!
Bot is short for robot, actually not a robot but a program that does something for a user. Some bots are good - they manage channels, moderate games, etc. Others are annoying - pestering users, taking over channels, or as in this case, playing in the place of a human.
You block players by screwing up the board in a way that screws them more than it screws you, i.e. by playing a lousy word on a choice spot - or playing a less valuable word because it might create more valuable choices for the other player. I think there's a lot of strategy among the more highly rated players.
To pass means to skip one's turn, with the option of returning some or all of one's letters and retreiving new ones. I note now that the game on yahoo is not called scrabble, but literati. Literati is slightly different than scrabble. The points for letters are different, I think, and I believe the letters are randomly generated with P(1/26) for each instead of according to a predefined number of each letter.
When I played with my grandma, I never won because I always went for long and cool words instead of maximum points. So I would play a word like orbital without a word multiplier instead of playing, say, trail on a triple word. Not like that any more, as I would like to see exactly how hard it is to learn the strategy, but that's how I used to play.
We're very fond of Boggle at home (not online of course). We can handicap the game very easily. I have to play words of 4 (sometimes 5) or more letters. Oldest daughter and wife play regular rules. Youngest daughter gets to play one and two letter words and gets to keep words even though others have them.
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