Oh Lordy, I'm getting sucked into this again. But does that make Lingo a contest and not a game? After all, you can't do anything to defend against the other team in Lingo. Well, I guess you could go over and beat them up, but Chuck wouldn't like that. All you can do is try to guess the words. It's you against the board.
Maybe you could argue that if you guess all the words the other team will never get a chance to play. But once the other team is playing, you can't do anything to make the, er, contest tougher for them.
Same for Wheel of Fortune. It's basically you against the board, and the only way you can "defend" against the other contestants is to guess the puzzles. But that's like saying that you can defend against your opponents in golf by shooting a score so low nobody can catch you.
OTOH, consider Russian Roulette, where you can directly force your opponent to play on a nasty question. I'll admit there's real "defense" involved there. So is RR more of a "game," while Lingo and WoF lean more towards "contests"? Yikes, we could go down a list of game shows and start separating them into "game," "contest," "more game than contest," "more contest than game," "heck if I know," etc., based on how possible "defense" is.
This is getting too subtle for me. I'll just check out of the conversation.