c4countdown

Like Goatdown but you choose the letter at the beginning. It might not sound that great but there are subvariants where you pick a different number of letters (rather than just the one), up to about five. I see this as more of a training aid than a great competition because you will soon the learn the most common words when you've got certain letters in the selection.

This might not be new but I don't think I've seen it suggested.

Choose the letter at the beginning? Surely this is pointless.

That sounds shit. Choose the last 2 letters might be good.

As I say, it's more of (solely) a training aid than a good competition idea. You see a selection with a certain combination of letters - given that there are these letters, what are the words to look out for? From this point of view it really makes no difference if you choose the letters at the beginning or end really, I suppose, but if you're going into a round wanting certain letters in advance I think it makes more sense to pick them at the beginning.

Shit? pointless? No - you just lack my vision.

Why not go the whole hog then and let the computer choose the last few letters for you. It could pick a word you havent seen before or one you miss a lot as the max. You could have a letters attack with the same fixed letters, set things so that every round contains x vowels or has a darrenic winner and so on. Personally I would enjoy playing some like Kirk in a game where every round was guaranteed darrenic.

You are right though that some training modes could be an interesting addition to apterous. I think playing lots of games works, but is quite an inefficient way of getting good. Obviously your particular implementation was still shit.

As well as choosing letters, perhaps you could choose not to have letters. I think it would be useful to eliminate the E, for example, to build up a knowledge of words without an E, as those selections often appear quite awkward.

Gavin Chipper wrote:perhaps you could choose not to have letters

Isn't that called a numbers attack?