I’ve been doing the NY Times Spelling Bee pretty much every day for the last several years. For the most part it has been a faithful companion — challenging to my brain, while soothing to my nerves.
But today there was a surprise. To get a perfect score, I believed that I needed to find 41 words (and 207 points), as you can see in the screen capture below left.
Yet after I had entered 40 words (and accumulated only 193 points), the app declared that I had found all possible words, as you can see in the screen capture below right, which is showing the first 24 words out of 40.
The missing 14 points would have come from two things: 7 points for finding a seven letter word, plus an extra 7 points for that word being a pangram (a word that uses all seven letters).
As you can see in the image to the left, there are supposed to be three pangrams. But the app told me that I had achieved a “Queen Bee” — a perfect score — even though I had found only two pangrams.
Somehow there is a discrepancy today between the instructions and the game itself — something I had never encountered before. I had often wondered whether something like this could ever occur in Spelling Bee, and now I know.
Frankly, I feel cheated. It’s like going bowling and being told that you’ve just bowled a perfect strike. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that you only knocked down nine pins, because the headpin was missing.