Fell in the final strait

A thrilling finish to today's game of Scrabble, in which BH had scored a few coups and thought she was coasting to a well deserved win.

However, the game was nearly over when I pulled second blank and was able to put 'adamant' on a triple word, top middle. Not a big deal in itself, but attracting a bonus of 50 for using up all my letters.

Just one letter left for me in the bag, an 'E', while BH had a fistful, including the 'Z'. She fought back by tacking 'er' onto 'talk' on the bottom row to make 30 points on the triple, but then I went out with 'den' on the left. She might have been ahead on score, but was sunk by the penalty of 32 points. She was not best pleased.

Some consolation in that it was the first game for some time, for nearly a year, that we managed a combined score of more than 600 points. See reference 2.

PS: it is left as an exercise for the interested reader to reverse engineer the game from the closing position. An exercise for the well educated reader to determine the circumstances in which this puzzle has a unique solution.

Reference

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamant.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/04/bastides-out-of-sainsburys.html.