We Accept Your Dare, New High Scorer!

We have noticed here at Swamp Talk that our family members get just as into (and often more competitive about) the game as we do. This is certainly true for our intern David’s mother Kathy who, after reading about Chris’ high score, was determined to beat it. Once she had achieved her goal, she sent us an email saying “I smashed the record with a 539.  Post that on your blog, I dare you, lol.”  Well Kathy, we accept your dare and offer you our congratulations!

We noticed that, like Chris and Pat, Kathy leans towards longer words and doesn’t seem to waste many letters on smaller ones. Most of her words are worthy 25 points or more.

Hint: Suffixes

Working on this objective?

          “In one game, use 5 of these suffixes: -al, -ed, -er, -es, -est, -ful, -ing, -ly.”

Of course, these aren’t the only suffixes in English. For example, there’s also -able, -hood, -ify, -ish, and -ment, to name a few. This objective focuses on the ones that are most likely to be useful when you’re playing Swamp Talk. They’re short; most use common letters; and they can make a lot of words. If you cluster these letters on your word line, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to make a word with them.

Check out these lists of common words that end with these suffixes.

As with the prefixes, any word ending in these letters will do, even if they’re not functioning as a true suffix. So QUEST counts as well as OLDEST, and STRING counts as well as DOING. You just have to have at least two additional letters in the front (so BED, JEST, RING, and SLY are too short).

Hint: Prefixes

The prefix game objective (100 Letters level 5) has been one of the most controversial ones within our team:

          “In one game, use 5 of these prefixes: de-, dis-, en-, mis-, pre-, re-, un-”

It’s a hard one! To help you out, we’ve compiled these lists of common words that begin with these prefixes.

A question we’ve debated is: what should count as using a prefix? In PRETEEN, pre- is clearly a prefix, and in PRETZEL it clearly isn’t. But what about PREFER or PREMISE? Here, the prefix pre- were added before the words became part of English. We don’t say FER, but the Romans did, and we can still hear the meaning of “before” in the words. Should that count?

And what about PREEMIE? It comes from PREMATURE, where the pre- is clearly a prefix. Is it still a prefix in PREEMIE?

We enjoy these questions, but we concluded that they shouldn’t matter in Swamp Talk. Our game objectives are intended to help you get better at playing the game. And in the real game, any word is fair play. So Swamp Talk will accept any word that adds at least a couple letters to the prefix (meaning you can’t meet the dis- requirement with DISS, but you can with DISCO). Just for fun, some of us set ourselves the extra challenge of using only “true” prefix words. Others went for the most direct route available. It all depends on what you consider fun!

Hint: How to use a lot of vowels

You might have a lot of vowels on your word line. Or, you be trying to meet this high-level Survival objective:

          “In one game, play five 4+ letter words that have more vowels than consonants.”

We found this one of the hardest objectives to play. But we came out stronger. When vowels start raining down, we know what to do.

The first thing is to know vowel-heavy words. See below for some of the most useful vowel-heavy words in 4 letters.

Remember: if you use a lot of vowels meeting an objective, you might not have a lot left over for just staying alive! So it also helps to know how to use a lot of consonants. More on that later…

Four-letter words with three vowels:
 acai          aeon         ague         aide          akee*         aloe
 aqua          area         aria         aura          auto          beau
 ciao          ease         eave         epee          euro          idea
 iota          lieu         luau         oboe          ooze          ouzo
 roue          urea         zoea (crab larva)

(* Akees are a tropical fruit. We have eaten them. They’re good!)

Five-letter words with three vowels are very common. We put them on another page, along with some six letter words with FOUR vowels!