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Omelette

From Countdown

Omelette is a Countdown variant invented by Charlie Reams and launched on Apterous in October 2009.

Letters rounds

In letters rounds, 3, 4, or 5 letters will be shown. The object of the game is to find the shortest-possible word that uses all of the displayed letters. Scoring is done by Stepdown — 10 points are awarded if you find the shortest possible word that uses them all, 9 points if your declared word is one longer than the shortest, 8 points if it is two letters longer, and so on. All selections must contain at least one consonant. In rounds where there is no valid word that uses all the letters, the aim is instead to use as many of the letters as possible. So, in a four-letter round, if there are no valid words that use all four, you need to try and find the shortest one that uses three. Working out when you should use less-than-all of the letters is a big part of the tactics in Omelette!

Numbers rounds

Numbers rounds work in a similar way to the regular numbers rounds, the important change here being that to score points you MUST use all six numbers in your solution. Like letters rounds, scoring is done by Stepdown — 10 points are awarded if you find the best solution, 9 points for being 1 away, and so on. This means that for possible numbers rounds, 10 away will score 0 points.

Conundrums

Conundrums have one unique nine-letter solution as usual, but you won't be seeing nine letters very often! As many letters as possible are removed, whilst making sure that the conundrum still has one unique answer. So you could be faced with having to find the nine-letter word from a scramble of anywhere between three and nine letters (seven on average). For example, the scramble ZCBIN has four letters missing, but it is still only possible to make one unique nine-letter word by adding four to these five. In this case, the answer is CARBONIZE.