Some kinds of brains must just not be good at this kind of game.

I used to win spelling bees in school, but I played the entire archive on this game and my highest score was 6/18.

Maybe it has to do with the balance between audio and visual learning. Spelling bees are spoken words in, letters out -- not letters in, words out. When trying to solve these, I kept trying to sound out different orderings of letters, maybe that's not how good players do it?

I think I get anchored too easily based on what my brain sees in the scrambled letters.

A re-scramble button would do wonders for me like in that Spelling Bee game on NYTimes.