NaNoWriMo

Well, this one was a month in the making... I won NaNoWriMo!

I honestly don't mean this to sound braggy, but this isn't unusual... I've won for years now.

In case you aren't familiar, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Specifically, between 12:01am on November 1 and 11:59pm on November 30. If you finish your word count, you win!

As you can see on my little bar graph up there, I was behind pretty much all month, but I pulled it together and got it done.

Red Herring

Red Herring is a word sorting game. (Two of my favorite things: words and sorting!!!)

There are categories at the top (in the harder mode, you aren't given the categories until you complete the column of all the words that belong in the same category) and there are four "red herring" words that don't belong to any category, there only to throw you off. Which is the meaning of "red herring." Get it?

New York Times Crossword

This was a doozy. We went over to my in-laws' for dinner and my sister-in-law was working on the NYT crossword when we got there.

I am proud to say that we finished it (and less proud to say that we did actually look up like two or three of them because we didn't get the shtick for the italicized clues).

7 Little Words

This is a fun little word game that I used to have on my old phone and had totally forgotten about. You get tiles (at the bottom) with two or three letters on them, and clues (at the top) and you have to put the tiles together to make the words you're looking for at the top. It can get pretty tricky.

Number of Words

(Hey, there are some games it's just hard to take a picture of.)

This is a game derived from Whose Line Is It Anyway? Much like the Questions game I've played with Garrison before. In this game, each person is assigned a number of words, and every sentence they say has to be exactly that number of words: no more, no less. I did four, and Garrison did five.

We agreed that it wasn't quite as fun as the Questions game, but still some good wholesome fun for a Friday afternoon at work.

Word Sprints

This one's a little bit different.

It's NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which means I - along with LOTS of other people in the world - will be spending a large chunk of time this month trying to bang out a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. It's not supposed to be good; it's supposed to be WRITTEN. Editing can come later, if you like any of what you came up with.

Anyway, a long-held tradition in NaNoWriMo is word sprints. You set a timer for a certain amount of time (frequently 1, 2, or 5 minutes) and write as many words as you possibly can during that time. Then you reset the timer and try again, in an attempt to do better than you did the first round. You can also do word sprints against another person or a group of NaNo-ers, to see who can write the most during the time period.

I did a two-round, two-minute word sprint with myself. I don't remember my word counts, unfortunately, but I do remember that I did better during the second one by about twenty words, so go me!

Fight List

You know Family Feud, right? This is kind of like that. You're given a category, and you have to guess as many things that fall in that category as you can within the time limit. You get points based on how common/uncommon your guesses are, and you're playing against another individual somewhere in the world.

I think I did okay for being half-asleep because I nearly forgot to play a game today.

Between the Lines

Between the Lines is really similar to yesterday's Symbology, but the clues are more like Rebus puzzles instead of just symbols, and there are no category hints. In this example, the answer was "pie in the sky."

Symbology

Symbology is a phone app game where you are given three clues (a category, some symbols, and a number of letters for the word/phrase you're supposed to guess) and then you use the letters you're given to spell out what you're supposed to guess.

For example, on the top, the left answer is "right" and the right one is "Canada."

And of course, I was very happy to get this one!

Baby Shower "Scattergories"

Here's a unique one! I drove out of town to go see my friend Cassy and go to her baby shower, and I knew that there would have to be a game of some kind... and I was not disappointed!

We played a Scattergories-style game (I qualify it like that because we didn't really keep score or anything... it was like Scattergories Lite, or casual Scattergories) where we had a time limit to come up with words that had to do with babies for each letter. It's harder than you might think!

So we had fun, it was great to see some of my friends that I rarely get to see, and congratulations to Cassy and Damian on their upcoming little one! (And my two other pregnant friends who were there, Jessica and Anna!)

Baikoh

I know I've mentioned before that I prefer games to be escapism, not necessarily a challenge... so this one stressed me out a little. But it was still fun.

The letter tiles fall from the top at random, and you tap on them to spell words and make the used letters disappear. The letters you use don't have to be touching or in any kind of order or anything. If you make words that don't exist, though, you get a layer of letters (one on every column) after your third non-word guess.

There are also some traps, which is the really annoying part. I mostly ran across the ice trap. You get a random letter that is icy, and if it sits there too long, it freezes adjacent letters, too. You have to use a frozen letter multiple times before it thaws and disappears, and if you use up letters underneath a letter that has frozen to the one next to it, it won't fall down (because it's attached to the one next to it). Annoying.

It's a really nice looking game though. I wish the letter blocks weren't all different colors (maybe three shades would work best: consonants, vowels, and tricky letters like Q/X/Z) because it makes it harder to tell which ones you've selected.

Music Crossword

This one's a little different! I saw the above posted to a Facebook friend's wall, and thought that would be fun. If it's hard to see, it's a crossword where each clue is written in music notes.

It was pretty easy, when you consider (1) I took piano lessons for ten years and was in marching band for four years, and (2) all the clues were in treble clef, so I didn't even have to switch back and forth to bass clef.

Word Whomp

Word Whomp (from Pogo) is a lot like a game Cassy and I used to play through Facebook... but I can't remember the name of it. Word... something. Word Twist, maybe? Except this one has gophers... and a chat window on the far right that nobody used.

I actually went looking for Psychobabble, which I've done several times in the past... decade? But it is long gone, and I found this instead.

The picture above was from my best round, where I actually figured out all the words. In all the other rounds I played, I missed a couple words.

USA Today Crossword Puzzle

I've always avoided crossword puzzles, because inevitably, there are always a couple of clues that I just couldn't possible know, and I have to resort to looking them up (if I can even sort out what they're looking for).

But I like this one, partly because it seemed kind of easy (I knew or could guess - with a few letters there from other clues - almost all of the clues) and partly because, if you type in the wrong letter for that box, it shows up red. So if I have narrowed it down to a couple possibilities, I can try one and see if it's right. It's like doing the crossword in the newspaper with pencil... except better.

I win, yay!