Well Letterpress is pretty good. You can just wing it – and always trying to make the longest words possible should give you a decent shot – but with some more experience under my belt, it’s startled me how much of a brain-burner it becomes if you really try to plan for the final round throughout the game…
Looking at your current Collection, you can always try to establish what final word you might be aiming for; which letters you’ll still need to get in order to make it; whether the library has any of those letters; whether your previous word has any of those letters; whether the cards you are in the process of drafting for your next word have any of those letters; and then you need to try to figure out how to proceed in order to give you the best chance of getting the letters you need from wherever they are at the time. Your collection is empty to begin with, so “anything is possible” at the start, but you’ll likely find yourself with some specific desired letters as the rounds progress.
When drafting cards, you firstly deal 5 cards and pick 1, then deal 4 and pick 1, etc, with no choice for the final card. (I deal myself five face-down piles containing 5,4,3,2,1 cards respectively, and then reveal and choose from one pile at a time.) So every turn there are a total of 15 letters for which you are pondering not only their potential use in this round’s word, but also how that letter would affect your options for a final-round word; and if you do want that letter for the final round, do you want to use it in your current word, or is it better to draft it but not use it and try to get it out of the Library in a subsequent turn? Either way there are risks of not being able to get it into your Collection at all, and higher-value cards especially might be harder to get back if you play them in a word. There’s also the persistent question of whether to draft high-value letters in the first place… on the one hand you want to make high-value words, but on the other hand you don’t want too many high-value letters getting into the Library, so you might be trying to balance that at the same time.
Unless you have a great word in the bag early, you rarely have much certainty about anything, so you’re always adapting to the cards you’re drawing. And again, you can wing it the whole way and just see what you end up with, and I’ve won several games just doing that (luck is very much a factor in a game like this); so burning your brain to maximise your success rate is really an opt-in experience :)
If you’re a solo gamer and love word games and also puzzles, I’d suggest taking a look at Letterpress.
Best result to date: Final word = 20; Library = 7. (Or final word = 24 if we allow “unfrisky” which, as I’m playing solo, I definitely allowed ;) 20 isn’t unusually high, but 7 is very low. I was also pretty pleased on the turn when I managed to put down “bunkers” from the 2 start cards + 5 drafted cards, meaning that the Library got one card smaller that round!