For months now, I've played Scrabble almost every Sunday afternoon.
I've always been fascinated by the patterns that spontaneously grow as you add word to word. I have a plan to make them into an installation, and sell it to Tate Modern for tens of thousands.
Or you could set it as a writing exercise - compose a short story or poem using all the words on this board...
All the words seen here are genuine words, to be found in the Official Scrabble Dictionary - though there's many I haven't heard of. Tid? Riz? I'm always slowing down the game by demanding to know 'what that means.'
Davy is nearly always the winner, by hundreds of points, because he has a mathematical mind and doesn't care what the words mean, so long as they're allowed and score highly. (Though he is always grumbling that the strange words defined in the dictionary as 'Scots usage' are news to him. Words like 'ee' and 'em.' That's the whole word - em. I think it means 'uncle.')
After his first turn, Sheila and I usually offer to fetch our coats. With his first go this Sunday, he used up all his seven letters (thus earning a 50-point bonus) and got on a treble word square. He wondered aloud if the 50 points were trebled too - but Sheila declared that she didn't care what the rules were, if he tripled the 50 along with the rest of his score, she was chucking the board up the garden. So he only beat us by his usual 200 or so.
And then, in the second game, he used all seven letters in a turn three times. We fetched our coats.
