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.
8 comments:
hahahaha ... My uncle John used to be fiercely competitive like that. Scrabble was our family game ... so when I was in hospital near to where he lived, my favourite Aunty Peg sent him along with the board to try and cheer me up. He thrashed me. Several times. "But I'm in hospital!" I wailed pathetically. "You're supposed to let me win!" I should have known better really, having grown up with it. But what annoyed me most was that he too memorised lists of words from the dictionary - all the little short ones, and the words with difficult letters. If you challenged him, he would have no idea what they meant, but sure enough, they would be in the dictionary ...
Snap! - That's exactly what Davy does. He's memorised loads of two-letter and three-letter words - and all the words where you can use the 'q' without a 'u'. And he's in a local club, where he plays most weeks - and sometimes even loses.
He's worried, though, bless him, that Sheila and I really mean it when we tease him about winning all the time... We both enjoy the game, and it's nice to win occasionally, but I don't think either of us really cares.
Za and Zo - those are god ones.
Pfft! I mean, 'good' ones.
Is it possible to shoehorn in a new Davy-specific rule - you have to know what the word means? Be able to use it in a sentence?
I like that writing challenge one a lot!
I thought of you when I set it!
I don't think there's any way to nobble Davy. It's in Scrabble's rules - if it's in the Official Scrabble Dictionary, it's allowed. There's no rule about knowing what it means.
It's a great book, the Scrabble Dictionary. It's full of the most arcane, wierd words, culled from the least used volumes of the multi-volume OED, I reckon.
With my old floppy-friendly computer I used to have a Scrabble game. It was great: I could play the computer and you could do sneaky word peeks. Learned a lot about little words. My favourites were qi and wen
:-)
Oh qi is always good - and qadi and qat - and ki. And gi, which I believe is a Shetland fiddle. Or is that a gu?
Hrmmmm .. challenge ... isn't Gu a type of expensive chocolate pudding you can buy from the supermarket? LOL
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