Wordament - Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Wordament is an addictive free 4×4 grid MMOWPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Word Playing Game, available for users of Windows Phone 7+ & Windows 8.

Here are some tips drawn from others & my own (limited) experience to score better -

• Hunt for patterns, not words. Practice looking for common letter combinations and roots, which can help you quickly rack up points. A nugget like EAD, for example, can lead to BEAD, DEAD, HEAD, LEAD, MEAD, and READ.
• Pay attention to prefixes and suffixes. Wherever you find common prefixes (DE, DIS, RE, and UN) or common suffixes (AL, ED, ER, ES, ING, LY, S) juicy words usually aren’t far behind. The most common prefixes are RE and DE.
• Mind your Vs and Qs. Focus on high-scoring tiles such as Q, Qu, K, Z, V, which help you pile on the points even with short 3-letter words.
• Don’t forget the past. One common beginner’s mistake is forgetting to swipe in plural and tense variations of a word. In Wordament, JUMP, JUMPS, JUMPING, and JUMPED are all legal plays.
• Know your anagrams. If you see a word like EAT, remember to swipe in anagrams like ATE, TEA, ETA, and TAE (obscure but legal).
• Avoid guessing - Guessing is penalized with a one second delay in accepting new words. A guess is defined as attempting to enter multiple incorrect words in a row.
• Use the tile rotator to discover new patterns with the same letters

• Take advantage of Themed puzzles - Currently there are two kinds of themed puzzles: Digram puzzles (single tile containing two letters, like TH) and Hidden word puzzles (containing 6 – 10 words within a given category, like food or birds). For example, the Body theme may have the words LIVER, EYE and EYES - the plural is accepted if the body has two.
• Practice

Trivia:

Wordament creators, John Thornton & Jason Cahill.
Picture courtesy:  The Windows Blog

• Wordament is built by 2 Microsoft-ies, John Thornton and Jason Cahill 
• The game runs 24/7
• It is available in non-English languages.
• It uses the Google App Engine
• The game runs on a single global timer.
• It is possible to cheat using word solving software but beware - Wordament has a cheat prevention mechanism & cheaters can be banned.
• What dictionaries does Wordament use?  - "The Wordament lexicon is our own IP that combines indexing of electronic books, custom curation, and using actual play data in the game". In the Wordament blog comments, the creators also say "Our official arbiter of words is the Oxford English Dictionary."
• Bandwidth consumed - We believe we use 50k of your data for every game played. So playing 20 games (1 hour) equals 1MB.
• If you join a game that has already started, it will count toward your average if you play for more than 1:50 minutes. Consider partial games as “warm-ups”. Other games will count toward your totals, but not your averages. 
• The acceptable word list is heavily reviewed and that words where the primary and secondary meanings are vulgar are acceptable. If there is a primary or secondary definition that is racially hurtful or offensive, it is removed from the lexicon.
• Search FB & YouTube for videos on how the top-scorers do it.

work in progress..

Also see -
A three part series on MSDN on how the Wordament was built