I play to have fun, but not necessarily to win.
My best game is Boggle. In person, I've never lost a game. I have lost a few rounds, but never a game (though I did come close to losing a game once). A while back, I discovered boggle online. I played on mIrc and on games.com. Online I've found lots of people who can cream me with tidal regularity and I love it. I still like boggle, but games.com is really irritating these days - too hard to connect. They need more and faster servers, I think. But boggle's a pretty network intensive game (not in amount of bytes, but in frequency of packets sent). You need to be a good pattern matcher to play well at this game, but you also have to know some boggle words - words that don't seem to be anywhere but in an online boggle dictionary someplace. Rare words like cwm and airn, but also suspicious words like tegs, uta, var, and hols. Some people set themselves apart by not using these kinds of words.
Recently I started playing scrabble on yahoo which is pretty fun. I never really liked scrabble all that much before. I played to make cool words and not to win. But this is pretty fun. I can't play worth a crap, yet, but it's nice. I'm coming aware of strategy. There's a big luck factor in this game, but you definitely need to know rare words, be a good and quick pattern-matcher, and also have a tenable strategy. While I do not understand them very well, I discern that the strategies of the better players (ranked red on yahoo) prescribe methods for when and how to pass, and most importantly - how to block the other player. I was vaguely aware of this before, but it wasn't until I played a few games with different players that I realized how important this is. I can't do it yet. I only note. (Interestingly, these strategies are much hated by some other players.)
They came out with another word game called text twist on yahoo which is pretty fun, too. I like that one - it's almost like solo boggle. They also have an anagram game (with some annoying bugs) and daily cryptograms (though the software lacks an important feature - clear guesses).
In general, I think the people on the Boggle group are much, much friendlier and even supportive. Very different personality types. (Although there was once a guy who came in to play with a bot, which I thought was pretty rude. I don't consider him a boggle player, per se.) In the back of my mind, I'm wondering whether there is some reason for this other than chance. Not that I mind either way. I just ignore the boneheads and play.
There are several other word games I'd like to play, but haven't yet. I've heard about upwords, but have no idea what that one's about. Oh, and there's a pretty good game on mIrc, the name of which eludes me for now, in which a bot gives you a random sequence of letters, then everyone treats it like an acronym (that's it! the game is called acro!). Everyone submits their expansions in private to the bot, after time is up (60 seconds maybe) the bot prints the expansions and people vote on the best ones. I like the ones that make meaningful sentences.
Ah, well. I can go on a while longer, but I guess this is enough rambling.
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