Doing all the calculations for every EFF word fried my spreadsheet, but doing the math on the likelihood of a given word matching a buzzword here is very slim for most words (best of the first ~100 EFF words was “afterglow” with ~1.23% chance of getting a hit).

But if you pick a long word with lots of different letters like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” or “dermatoglyphics” your odds can get up to ~20%. With five buzzwords, that is a ~70% chance of getting a hit.

This highlights a tradeoff between going early to get the better moves in, and waiting to see how other moves are scored. And unfortunately, I think exposes a key problem—I could really see two optimal ways this could play out:

1) People realize its advantageous to get key long guesses in early. But if I didn’t get my move in early, its probably a better play for me to wait until everyone else has had their backronym scored so I can use that information in constructing mine. This slows down the game.

2) Alternatively, if people realize that waiting is actually the optimal move now everyone waits 2 days before making their backronym, that way others can’t respond do it. Which also slows down the game.

You could “fix” this by not scoring until a round completely ends, but then that just makes the first move advantage even stronger.

Does seem like the kind of thing we could probably fix as we go though. But still prefer my solution so will for now.

Also is there any worry that if https://blognomic.com/archive/bring_back_alf passes

people might consider “BABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ BBABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ” to be valid words? As long as the word is long enough, you’re better off farming points that way and taking the 1s on your score than you are actually playing the game

There are many ways to fix this as a game, but this was pitched as a “light and fun” round of Nomic where we voted to make submission order be part of the gameplay. So long as it’s not completely clear to everyone whether “react immediately” or “react last” is always the best way to play, it’s probably enough.

I don’t think anyone would consider “BABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ” to be a “word”, but you’re right that we should add more discouragement to abandoning regular scoring in favour of farming Buzzwords.