I'm not doing Advent, so it doesn't matter that this isn't a "game".
I mean, it IS a game. It just isn't, like, a "game"..

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Today's "I'm not doing Advent" game is unfinished, but you can totally play it, and if you do, I'd love some feedback on how well it works.

What You'll Need

(click for bigger)

1. Print this out. (Or load it up on your phone/tablet or something, using an art editor, so you can scribble your scores down)

2. Bag of letters.
Scrabble tiles will do. A physical Words With Friends set will do, too, though a few tiles have different values, you're only playing against yourself, so it isn't too big of a change.
Bananagrams and things like that don't tend to have values for the tiles, so those won't work as well.

How To Play

First off, a couple of targets have to be set. Put a random letter into "Starts with" and "Ends with", so you have something to aim for, and a random number (mid-20/30s) into the "Exactly" value near the bottom.

Once those are done, start your play of all 8 rounds.

For each round
Put the letters into the bag, shuffle them up, and pick out 10 tiles.
With those 10 tiles, make as many words as you can using each tile once. eg, a 3 letter word and a 7 letter word.

For each word, fit it into one of the 20 available word slots.
Tally up the points and put them into that row's score line. Add the word, so you can look back in future, and enjoy your list of words
If your word earns the bonus on that line, draw a circle around it. You get that!
If the word fails to earn the bonus, cross out the bonus. You don't get that!

If you use all 10 letters (whether one word or many little words) then give yourself the 50 point bonus for that round (circle!) otherwise cross it out.
Leftover tiles at the end of each round are discarded, so each round starts with 10 tiles.
If at the end of the game, you've used every letter in the game, you get the extra 100 point bonus.

woot!

Once done, tally up the scores for each word (whether they score the bonus or not, assuming they're legal words, of course!) and then add on all the circled bonuses.

Give it a Play

You probably won't get to fill out all the lines in the scoreboard. This is ok!
(I might change the number of rounds to 10, but I think the game might work better without completing the score card, as it gives you a more freeform to play as you'd like.)

Let me know how it plays. Does it feel ok? Does it make logical sense? Do the instructions for each row make sense?

I was going to add this to Shoebox, today. That was the plan. But time got away from me. I spent about 3 or 4 hours going over the list of "tasks" (/"tricks"?!) trying to find just the right set of gameplay elements, deciding on the best Bonus scores and things like that.

I think I've balanced everything suitably, but I figured if I'm not going to get everything done in a day, then I might as well ask for a bit of feedback.
Let me know if you think there's anything I should or shouldn't fix in the game. If there's anything "too" hard, or unfair, or unbalanced.

I might hold off on making the Shoebox version of this for a few days, or we'll end up having an identical game again tomorrow, so spend some time with the game, get to know it, and we'll all regroup in a few days to figure out how the game oughta work!

Thanks!

A.I. Corner

Lyrics : I wrote down the words as me and AL played a game of Crosswords in Shoebox, then added a couple of extra bits.

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Alternative version
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Sung by Suno


"Derek tries to play a game using scrabble tiles, but it isn't going very well. In the background a large sign says "I'm not doing Advent!!" " by Replicate/Flux

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