Words with Friends – A Stay At Home Dad

Hopefully I don’t regret sharing this too quickly.

I just finished a game of Words with Friends with a rather unusual play that allowed me to win pretty comfortably. The letter pile was exhausted and I only had 5 letters left in my rack: Q, I, F, U, and E. The game score was close enough and the layout was such that I a ended up putting a bit more effort into figuring out how to play my last letters.

After puttering around, I managed to form the word FIQUE, which I thought unusual because it’s rare that the Q gets played in the middle of a word. To make the play even more unusual, I hooked onto the word AID with the Q! I’m pretty sure outside of hooking to make the word QI, I don’t think I’ve ever hooked with a Q quite like that.

Naturally, I decided to look them up. Seemed the least I could do, seeing as they allowed me to win the game.

The word fique can refer to two things: the plant or the fiber that the plant yields. The fique plant is a member of the pineapple family with long, spiky leaves. It grows in South America, where it is used to create fique fibre. The fibre is very strong and used for weaving. Here’s an article with some pictures of the plant as well as the fiber and some photo-documentation of how the fiber is harvested from the plant. Interesting.

The word qaid is more straight forward- it’s a Muslim leader and can also be spelled caid (another word that could come in handy). There’s an anagram for QAID– QADI. It’s also a Muslim word and refers to a Muslim judge.

Considering the word SUQ is also a word of Muslim origin, it seems the Muslim language is the place to go to find unusual Q words.

I promise not to make a habit of this, but the odds-beating involved were enough that I had to jot it down for posterity’s sake. This is my “great Words with Friends Comeback” story.

I’m playing my father and it’s a tight game for the most part. He started hitting a few well placed words and he opened a 50 or so point lead on me. That’s not a worrisome lead because the scoring in WwF is pretty friendly. But we had a very tight board, lots of stacked words and the like, so the opportunity for good word play was rapidly diminishing if we didn’t have the right letters in our rack. That’s what started happening to me, until I ended up with ‘QUIZ’ in my rack.

I could have played it right then, but I realized that the perfect place to play it was to hit the TW and TL squares on the outer boundary. That way, a 10 point letter landed on a TL square, and then with the TW I was looking at a minimum of 120 points. Bye-bye lead. So I gambled and started biding my time. Playing as many of the other 3 letters in my rack as I could.

The decision was met with great peril. Dad slowly began increasing his lead. 75 points. Then 100 points. The effect only served to reinforce my determination because it was rapidly becoming my only option. Letters were running out and I still hadn’t found a way to play QUIZ like I wanted. Getting desperate, I started swapping tiles.

I finally caught my break with 8 letters left in the game. After a swap, I pulled a D and a blank tile. Surveying the board, there was a word ending in Y 1 square over and 2 squares up from the leftmost TL square on the bottom. I needed a 2 letter word that I could add a Z to so I could play QUIZ like I wanted. I made the blank an A and played AD next to the Y and spelled down. So the D hovered precariously over the TL.

The next part was the worst- waiting for Dad to make his move. He’s pretty good with gobbling up freebies like a D in the clear over a TL. My only hope was that it was late enough in the game and that he didn’t have an S or something to spoil my plans. Luckily, that’s how it played out.

At this point in the game, his lead had swelled to about 150 points. As I said, there were only 8 or so letters left in the game, so this was my only shot. When I placed it down, I did a quick guesstimate and figured it would either tie me up or leave me just shy. Either way, I knew it would be a BIG swing.

It was bigger than I expected. QUIZ by itself was worth 129. But I also had ADZ as well, which was another 32 (the A was no points since it was a blank). Giving me a total of 161 points for 4 letters played. I went from down 150 to up by 10. There were no other big point letters left to play, and it was solely a matter of who could empty their rack most effectively at that point.

I hung on and finished the comeback, adding about 20 more points to my total to hold Dad off. Final score, 353-349.

Nothing beats a comeback.