It’s part of my morning routine to play the daily puzzles on the Set Game website, and naturally the Quiddler puzzle is my favorite. (Though the new Karma one is growing on me.) The goal is to use every one of the cards laid out in the puzzle to make words of at least two letters, and I usually set myself the additional goal of equaling the bonus achieved by the high scorers. The following day they post the words played by the highest scorer, and I’ve picked up a lot of valid words that way.
But this morning, one of the words I had picked up and even used from time to time was rejected. What! What do you mean, “qre” is not a valid word?? I used it two days ago!
It burnished a suspicion I’ve had that the funky tricky little words in this puzzle aren’t consistently accepted or rejected. For a while I thought I just had a bad memory for what worked and what didn’t. But if the puzzle makers really are excluding words from the valid list from one puzzle to another, that’s. . .not a word game at all.
So I used the contact form to write a comment to deplore the arbitrariness of accepting a word one day and rejecting it the next. I don’t really care whether it’s one thing or the other, just so it’s consistent. I mean, do you know what qre means? Don’t tell me if you do.
I swear I turn more into John Spencer with every passing day.