Why I Suck At Scrabble
I have just had an enlightening conversation with FT’s own Sarah C during which I made the astonishing – to me and me only – discovery that you’re allowed to change your tiles over in Scrabble if your rack is rub. Sarah’s reply to this was “have you never looked at the rules ever?” and my answer has to be “Erm….no actually.”
The problem is….no, wait, the problem is that I am a nincompoop. But the idiosyncracy of Scrabble is that it is one of the most clearly designed boardgames ever: if you had never heard of Scrabble, and found a complete box – minus rules – on a desert island, then the game you and your Man Friday would create from it would actually be fairly close to the actual game. The letters, the numbers on the letters, the explicit idea on the board that you score for letters and words – it all fits together pretty easily. And certainly if you saw even a minute’s play you would feel you had the hang of it. Which is what, at some point, I obviously did. And since the swapping tiles thing doesn’t actually HAPPEN that often in Scrabble, I managed to play several games of it without ever being aware of this as an option!
Other boardgames which might pass the Desert Island test: Trivial Pursuit yes. Monopoly maaaaaybe. Cluedo surely not. Take the Brain? More so than Chess, obviously. Break The Safe? No chance mate.
An interesting side qn: which boardgames would fail the Desert Island Test in such a way that the derived rules would be more entertaining than the ‘real’ ones?
wff’n'proof
sadly our family version of this seems to have vanished :(
ludo. any game that involved the pieces of ludo but wasn’t ludo would inevitably be better than ludo, because it is the worst game ever. even popomatic dice, or klonks and klones couldn’t save it.
don’t miss the boat! is a variant of ludo which is EXCELLENT — of course the variation does involve having BOATS that you can MISS
But you WERE aware of the 50 point bonus for going all out, so obviously at some point you were exposed to a ruleset, and if you know that rule, why wouldn’t you know you can change tiles?!
cos the 50pt bonus happens EVERY game at a very memorable point. exchanging tiles only happens rarely with ppl who have read the rules.
Scrabble is one of those odd games where when you or your oppenents get good at it, it becomes sort of joyless. (sudoku has this too). there is more fun in playing without knowing the list of 2 and 3 letter words and without players running words into each other using those 2 and 3 letter words.
Haha changing your tiles happens at least once in every game with me in it. I am Oxidize man!
alan that is true of chess also!
“i have studied all the p-n3 games deeply”
“then fvck you and haha for DEEP BLUE you losah, i vote we play BUCKAROO again”
omigod i just remembered BUDDHIST SNAKES AND LADDERS which i played once when i wz at college
it was like snakes and ladders except snake = you did bad things in life and returned as a lowlier being, while ladder = the opposite, and ONCE YOU GOT TO THE BLESSED REALM you could no longer fall back to earthly lowliness but still had to go on going up and down ladders for an another trillion cycles of time until you BECAME THE BUDDHA (“must throw six”)
I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP: the board was utterly beautiful and vast w.teenytiny squares and the game was totally boring and annoying like S&L always is
BUDDHIST SNAKES AND LADDERS
Alan OTM about Scrabble.
I was aware of the 50pt bonus BUT I thought you could only get it at the start of the game!
I am the Lex of Scrabble.
Whenever I think of Scrabble, I think of this NFB classic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBeLt2S35G4
haha i love the big snit:
“stop shakin yr eyes! you’re always shakin yr eyes!”
also: “CARROST”
With chess there is precious little joy except in the proliferation of strategies. making horsey noises and going ‘take that, oof, arg, my queen i am hit, ect’ is about all there is :-(
scrabble has making words fun shot through it, which is eroded as it becomes more a mechanical process of maximising points and reducing plays.
Risk!! Any alternative rules for this must be better than the totally tedious actual rules.
see also Diplomacy, although I have a huge soft spot for Diplomacy.
I wish we had a radio show to discuss these things!!
We could just go to the pub and talk about it Tom?
B-b-but our VAST PUBLIC
I hope you know that this is making me very close to tipping off the Scrable wagon, unfortunately I don’t have anyone to regularly play Scrabble with anymore SO I MIGHT HAVE TO PLAY ONLINE SCRABBLE argh.
NB Alan is completely wrong and not at all getting that all the crazy two/three letter words are ALSO fun!
of course i’m not getting that – i am not bonkers in the nut.
IXIA off!
I do think there’s something to this idea that games get less fun as they become more masterable….one reason Carcassonne always rates high to me is that there’s really too many variables in play for you to intelligently game the points (which are all added up at the endgame and can easily shift massively from one player to another at unpredictable junctures). But somehow I’ve managed to avoid Scrabble becoming joyless even as I’ve learned a few (emphasis on few) of the esoteric things. The excitement of realizing you have a fabulous word in your tiles, and the frustration of discovering there’s nowhere to put it, don’t really change even as the word itself changes from QUIXOTIC to QWERTYS.
I remember a friend having a copy of some travelling around the world game about collecting holiday souvenirs, sans rules, where we were able to make up rules for it that seemed to work. In retrospect, though, I suspect that the players were meant to start and return to London, rather than start and return to Easter Island.
I remember getting a Waddingtons board game for xmas in the mid-sixties called The Battle of the Little Big Horn. It contained a fold-out board resembling a map of Little Big Horn divided into grids, about fifty 3 inch plastic soldiers and indians, two dice and absolutely no rules whatsoever.
I knew that my cousin was getting the same game, so I ran around to his house to see if there were any rules of play with his copy.
There weren’t.
So over the next few days we invented our own game with our own rules.
Does anyone else remember this game?
Did anyone ever get a rule book with their copy?
I think it was rush released to cash in on the huge success of the movie “Custer of the West”.
i remember it! and also that the version i saw had no rules — but i thought mny little friend had lost them (we were both six)
I Love Google.
I’ve just discovered this picture which prooves there were indeed rules issued (well they were with this set).
http://www.noizesolution.co.uk/images/Littlebighorn.jpg
I’m now tempted to track one down to find out what the rules actually were.
Boy, do I lead a sad life!