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It looks like my dad is going to be retiring from his job soon due to medical issues, and he mentioned that he'd like to find a website where he can play chess with people (as opposed to against a program). He used to be an expert-rated player, and I think it would do him good to get back into it now that he's going to have a lot of time on his hands. He also enjoys word games such as Scrabble and Boggle, so if anyone knows any good sites for those I'd love to hear about them too. Free sites are best, but he might consider something with a low subscription cost.
Thanks in advance!
Posts: 957 | Registered: Aug 2002
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He can play chess at princeclan.org, which is the brainchild of our very own Dagonee.
I believe there's an online scrabble site the a group of hatrackers use, but I don't know offhand which site it is.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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We have several expert or better players. We also have at least one player who regularly loses to expert players but generally provides a decent game. Anyone can join, and it's easy to use. It's correspondence chess, not real time.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Weboggle.shackworks.com is decent, I agree. It does not have interaction with other players, which I kinda like some days. It also does not use any official dictionary that I can figure out. So you might have words allowed that come from the North American Scrabble dictionary PLUS the British one PLUS some nonwords thrown in there just to keep it exciting.
Also unique to that site, as far as I know, is the ability to play "team" games. You and a buddy (or twelve) can sign up with the name Team Suchandsuch, and all of your efforts will be pooled. I use this occasionally to play with a niece or other young person so that they aren't discouraged by only finding a few words.
Tangleword at playsite.com is a decent boggle type game that is still free. There are the usual goobers, bored-and-looking-for-FUN-pretending-to-be-hotties, cheaters, and so forth. The dictionary is the pre-1996 Scrabble dictionary.
Bok, Boggle is definitely my favorite word game. It is "pure" word-finding ability. (There is strategy, but no one ever believes me when I say that.) If they had real official tournaments, I would be there for every one! Alas, I gotta do Scrabble tourneys if I want real-life action.
www.isc.ro is the only site I know of that offers close to tournament conditions with official Scrabble dictionaries. (You can't play more than 2-player games, for example, and I know that's a dealbreaker for some.) The interface is not awesome, but it is simple to learn and there are always helpers online who are willing to help. They are also willing to be sarcastic, so keep that in mind .
I think Hasbro has "official" Scrabble and Boggle sites that are supported by advertisers and therefore free. They are pretty-looking, but I don't find them as useful as the ones above. I'm a pretty hardcore tourney player, though, and I imagine that that colors my experience.
Chess? That's a game, right? Posts: 628 | Registered: Nov 1999
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Scrabble dictionaries are evil, particularly in Boggle. Personally, my friends and I use any that is available, with the following house rules:
1) No Interjections (wow, aha, umm, etc..) 2) No "By Shortenings"/Abbreviations (Not just acronyms, but also things like "stat"; words like "vet" are okay because they are words in and of themselves).
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BTW, Sharpie, how often do you play at webogggle? I play under the name of FuzzyBoots. Have they kicked a bunch of cheaters lately? I ask because I was consistently 30-50 on the 4x4 boards, but within the last month or two I've generally been top 20 on the same boards. That was after a break too, so I don't think I suddenly got better.
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I play often there -- I use a different name every time, I think . I almost always pick a Z word that sounds like a superhero word or name -- Zap, Zowie, etc. If John and I play as a team, we use Team Mosaic. We primarily play on the 5x5. I was a longtime player at playsite tangleword, just the 6x6 boards, and still tend to play the longer words.
You'd be surprised at how fast a non-cheater can be. Several of my Scrabble friends and I are bogglers (some of them because it is a study help, which is why the dictionary really matters!) and the ones that can type fast get accused of cheating ALL THE TIME. You can tell the ones that use solvers and dump text, because they either get them all or, in the case of weboggle, they get all the North American words . The solvers use one dictionary or another, in general.
There are also solvers that allow you to just pick words to input yourself, but those are fairly indistinguishable from "real" players and don't bother me at all. Just competition.
Real life play really is better .
Posts: 628 | Registered: Nov 1999
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I like the Boggle at Atari Play better. It does tend to be buggy and slow, but I like that it has a chat interface, and I like that you have ranking that is increased or decreased depending on how you play. The scoring is done different, too--you're only scored on the unique words you find yourself. The dictionary is better than Weboggle, too--I get annoyed that many of the three-letter words I've memorized from the Atari site don't work on Weboggle. Though there are some words that Atari doesn't know, either. Grr.
I'm almost always either xnera or xnera23 when I play games.
Stray, when I was in college I used to play chess on the Internet Chess Server. I often played in a text interface (!!!) but even then they had graphical interfaces you could connect with. I googled, and they're still around-- http://www.freechess.org/
Used to also hang out on the backgammon server. I think it was this one: http://fibs.org/Posts: 1805 | Registered: Jun 1999
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Personally, I'm semi-addicted to bookworm but that might not be cool enough for all you extreme boggle players.
Posts: 3420 | Registered: Jun 2002
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Oh, dandy. A lot of chess questions today . I use www.chess-live.com I am near expert myself, and there are plenty of people of all levels on the site.
Posts: 2705 | Registered: Sep 2006
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