Frivolous Friday: Kicking Ass at Wordament

I got a 96th percentile score in Wordament, and got into the top 20 ranking!

Wordament 96

Let me explain a bit, so you’ll know why this is so exciting to me. Wordament is a Boggle-type game played on phones and tablets: you get a four-by-four grid of letters, and you find as many words in it as you can (going sideways, up-or-down, diagonally, or any combo of these) in two minutes.

Everyone plays the same game/grid at the same time. So at the end, you get an absolute score (how many words you got, and how many points, you get more points for longer words or harder letters) — but you also get a comparative score, letting you know how you did compared to everyone else around the world playing the same grid. If you care about your scoring, this does sort of matter, and not just for being competitive: some grids are harder than others, and an absolutely score of (say) 600 points might be really good in a difficult grid, and pretty mediocre in an easy one. Your comparative score shows up as a ranking — you’re 102nd out of 614 people playing, or 345th out of 405, etc. And it shows up as a percentile: you did better than 80 percent of the other players, or 65 percent, etc. At the end of the game, you’re shown the scores of the very highest players, and of the players who did about as well as you.

So I was playing Wordament the other day, and I got by far my highest score. I scored in the 96th percentile, better than 96% of the other players. And for the first time, I got into the top 20 ranking. Out of 509 people playing, I was the 19th best.

Wordament 96 crop 1 percentile score

Other players looking at the scores of the very best players saw me. Me, in the top 20! (Well, okay, they saw “guest” — I haven’t logged into the thing with my name, and don’t plan to.)

Wordament 96 ranking

This is a big step for me in this game. I ordinarily score between the 70th and 80th percentile. It’s not unusual for me to get between the 80th and 90th; it’s also not unusual for me to get between the 60th and 70th, lower if I’m tired, or it’s an unusually hard grid or one that’s not in my wheelhouse (I suck, for instance, at the games where one tile can be either of two letters). I’ve only broken the 90th percentile a few times.

And the top 20 ranking always seemed like an impossible dream. I’ve always looked at the players in the Top 20, and thought, “Yeah, that’s out of reach, I might get pretty good at this game but I’m sure as heck never going to be that good.” I always thought players in the top 20 ranking must be super Wordament geniuses. Well, if they are, I’m one of them now.

SUPER WORDAMENT GENIUS! BOW DOWN TO ME, MERE MORTALS! LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!

Frivolous Fridays are the Orbit bloggers’ excuse to post about fun things we care about that may not have serious implications for atheism or social justice. Any day is a good day to write about whatever the heck we’re interested in (hey, we put “culture” in our tagline for a reason), but we sometimes have a hard time giving ourselves permission to do that. This is our way of encouraging each other to take a break from serious topics and have some fun. Check out what some of the other Orbiters are doing!

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Frivolous Friday: Kicking Ass at Wordament
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