Word Games or Puzzles

Scrabble is a go-to game in my household, always has been and always will be. It's one of those great games where every single time you play it's going to be different. It is a great mind exercise, which I am a firm believer in. Keep those ideas and thoughts flowing at all times, there's no telling what you may come up with. Never think you are too cool for a good old thinking game; once in a while you have to give beer pong a break and play some Scrabble.

Frankly speaking, there's only one game I always play with my friends - and that is scrabbles! The more we play it the more interesting it is - we learn new words from each other + relax at the same time :) 

If you have never played the game Apples to Apples before, you definitely need to find a box of it and grab a group of friends.  The game consists of two sets of cards: a green one of adjective and a red one of adjectives.  One person pulls a green card and the other players need to put down a red card that the green card could describe.  The person who put down the green card then picks his or her favorite red card.  The options could be serious, literal, funny, or completely nonsensical, and the person can choose a card for any reason.  In college, Apples to Apples is a great game to play to warm up to people.  It gives you a real sense of someone’s sense of humor and the way he or her thinks.  And the game only gets more fun once you know people better and van play cards that you know they will specifically enjoy.  The game works best if you play in a group of five to eight people.  Any less and it is not that fun and any more and the game tends to get a little bit tedious.  Happy gaming! 

When I have some spare time on my hands, or when I'm in line waiting for something, I love playing Sudoku. I just download it on my phone and play away. Sudoku is a game with various tiles, and numbers scattered on a couple of tiles. The goal of the game is to get every row and every individual  box containing the numbers one through nine. It sounds pretty simple, but you can easily get frustrated. This game teaches me patience and discipline, which helps us all in daily life. It's not a game that you play just for fun, it happens to be beneficial to the brain as well. It helps you stay focused and also improves your strategy skills. So next time you're waiting in line or you are just curious to try out a new game. Download sudoku or pick up a sudoku puzzle book at your local bookstore. It might just become your new favorite game!

I enjoy many types of puzzles. However, I enjoy puzzle hunts the most. Puzzles in a puzzle hunt are different than the puzzles that you may be used to; they almost always do not come with directions, giving a two-step challenge. To figure out these types of puzzles, you first have to figure out how the puzzle works to solve it. Usually the answers will be words in English. In addition to this, in a puzzle hunt there may be various metapuzzles, which are puzzles which use the solutions to other puzzles. Puzzle hunts are difficult, and as a result require multiple people to complete, giving you the experience of working as a team. One of the less complicated puzzle hunts is the Harvard Puzzle Hunt, which can be found at http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/hunt/. If you are competing in a puzzle hunt on-site, usually after you solve the final meta you will be directed through a runaround, which usually entails completing shorter, easier puzzles and running around. I have participated in the Mathcamp Puzzle Hunts in 2010 and 2011 and both times I had a great time! Make sure to bring snacks, because usually an entire puzzle hunt can take hours or even up to thre days! Puzzle hunts are a great way to work as a team, solve puzzles, and have fun!

I love playing Sudoku. It is a Japanese game with a grid of 9x9 squares. The goal is to fill in the numbers such that each row and each column of the grid contains numbers 1-9 only once.The game became world hit in 2005 and after that it became a part of newspapers in regular publications and since then I am playing this puzzle game. I find game more interesting when it is a challenge to time than it is to number of moves you make. Usually I and my younger brother both race against each other and clock to finish the game and it is of great fun at that time. 

I enjoy a variety of word games and puzzles. One of my favorites is the game of Scrabble, which involves spelling words in exchange for points. Each letter has a point-value and the harder the letter is to use up, the higher its point-value is. This game is fun to play with like-minded people who also enjoy spelling. A dictionary is helpful to have in the even that a word is disputed. Sometimes words will be made up or will not be common enough, so looking it up in the dictionary will verify if it is a legitimate word or not. Another fun word game is Scattergories. Scattergories involves a dice with letters that is rolled along with notepads listing a variety of categories, from movie names to U.S. cities. When the dice is rolled, whatever letter it lands on is the letter that every category must begin with. It is fun to see how many different names in the different categories each player comes up with. Other fun word games include word searches and crossword puzzles. I could play crossword puzzles for hours, I learn something new when I have trouble finding the answers and crossword puzzles are stimulating for my brain.  

The only word game me and friends play is SCRABBLE. This game is really fun and this is very much helpful in improving one’s vocabulary. The more you play the game, the more you get the chance of having you vocabulary tank get refilled. When you guys are scoring, then the game is more challenging since you have to choose the right tile to get double or triple scores out of the words or letters you have placed. Playing this game is fun especially during semester breaks, summer breaks and holidays. We used to play this game before to kill the very long summer time at the province. We don’t have any choice because the city is very far and you would surely rather stay and drown yourselves with anything from the house rather than going to the city, since aside from it is far, the road to the city is very much rocky and dusty. This is the reason why we started loving scrabble. At first we were just forced to play the game since my cousins got no idea on playing chess. Eventually, we learned to really love it because this game would really twist your brain and would sharpen your strategy skills, strategy in a way that you will be practiced to analyze things out specially on the part of choosing the right tile to be able to defeat your opponent and to be able to gain a high score. We play this game all day long. We would only stop when our maid would call for lunch, 4pm-snacks and dinner.   For those who haven’t tried playing this game, go play this one now! I promise you won’t regret sitting down and trying to construct words here and there.