Octaletter thriller!

Curious about Cardket that I wrote about last week, I logged on to their site, hoping to see a simple online rendition, or perhaps other interesting tiles. It was a terrible disappointment. I got to see some dated pictures of an event conducted at a local cake fair, some tacky product pictures, and a bunch of inactive links.

I turned back to the now familiar www.eastoftheweb.com [1] and clicked my way into that magnificent games section. Each time I log on, I play a few more rounds of one of the games I’ve tried earlier, and then ever so cautiously, try out something new. Each time, I’m delighted to report, I’ve been amazed at the consistently first rate quality. Jaideep is writing this seminal tome on product design and user experience. He’ll marvel at the incredible focus of the developers in every aspect of design execution. Try as I might to be critical, this is winning stuff. The Apple of word gaming, without the hype!
Multi Eight Letter is an adrenaline rush from the moment the countdown begins. There are ten one-minute rounds to a game, with ten seconds between rounds. Each player in the game room sees the same set of eight jumbled letters. You need to make as many words as you can from those letters. The longer your words, the more the points. Keyboard use is faster than clicking on the letters on screen. In an evil twist, in every round you’re challenged with a target score. If you don’t reach the target score, no points for that round!
The high point is unscrambling the jumble to get the eight letter word. In my ten rounds, I managed just twice, and was so busy basking in the achievement, that I didn’t submit enough other words. This meant I trailed behind the seven other players in the game room pretty consistently through every round. In case you haven’t got it, the word in the screen grab is ‘resident’! If you love word play, compete at Multi Eight Letter. And for the Cardket team, do visit this site. You’ll see what I mean.
— The author may be contacted at arup_kavan@yahoo.com [2]