- Aims for the fastest time
- Manipulates luck
As a fan of tournament-play Scrabble I wanted to try a run of this game, but my dreams of a speedrun showing off crazy vocabulary for tons of points was dashed when I realized the best speedrun strat is to play no words at all.
Basically, four passes in a row ends the game immediately. Fortunately the dumb AI never seems to exchange tiles and will simply pass when it can't play anything. When the game ends, each player with remaining tiles gets the point total of those tiles subtracted from their score. In order for this strategy to work, I needed to wait until I got a game setup with 1) an opponent with an unplayable rack and 2) for that rack to be worth more points than mine. Amazingly I only needed to wait 2 frames for this exact situation to show up.
Noxxa: Judging.
Noxxa: The Vault rules state that board games are ineligible for the Vault. This movie falls in the same boat as the recent Othello submission. While Scrabble, unlike Othello, has an intrinsic element of randomness in the run, it still depends on terrible decision-making by the AI to work. The random aspect of the gameplay is not visibly pronounced in the run either, nor is this, as Nach put it with Othello, "a run which portrays TASing mastery over regular game playing", as neither player even successfully makes a move. As such, rejecting.