I’ve been playing Scrabble, the crossword board game, since I was old enough to spell. I’ve been watching my family play Scrabble ever since I was able to sit in a high chair. Safe to say, it has been a part of my life for a long time, and I’ve been playing only a little bit less than that.
I can remember watching my maternal grandmother and my father play epic games that would take hours as they hunted for the right word to play, and planned an intricate strategy to keep each other from hitting the bonuses and racking up the higher score. I remember many a game between my mother and father. When I was finally old enough, I started playing as well. Sometimes against a brother, and sometimes against my parents. Well, in those early days, not so much against as with them. I couldn’t be said to offer real competition until my teenage years, and even then I lost pretty regularly.
Now, as an adult, my dad and I are fairly evenly matched at the game. Our strategies are similar, no small wonder me having learned from him, and our vocabularies are each fairly extensive. It usually comes down to the luck of the letters, or some lucky play that determines the outcome of our games, one way or the other.
And, when I am not playing my parents in Scrabble, I often spend time online playing against an AI player. Playing online keeps my skills sharp, and helps me to continually refine my strategy and increase my vocabulary. When I play a slightly more advanced AI, I learn words I didn’t know before, and I also have to be cleverer to beat it.
I wonder if there are any other casual Scrabble players out there? I am sure there must be, after all, it is a fairly popular game. Scrabble was invented, in more or less the same format, in the 1930’s. It was refined through the decades, and sold a few times, until it reached the more or less standard form we know today: a 15×15 grid of squares, 98 letter tiles (and two blanks) of various point values, and various squares marked with available bonuses. Playing a crossword-type game, 2-4 opponents play words and accumulate scores thereby. It seems simple, but there is a surprising amount of intricacy to the game. Scrabble also exists in more than English, being extant in at least 10 other languages (according to Wikipedia, I didn’t do extensive research for this post, I’ll admit).
I thought about sharing my accumulated Scrabble skills and strategies in a series of posts here on my blog, for any other recreational players that may be out there. I don’t claim to be an expert, or some sort of Scrabble savant, only good enough to challenge my dad and mom regularly. But I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two along the way, and I don’t mind sharing what I do know. After all, I don’t like gatekeeping, and I don’t like hoarding knowledge. The worst that could happen is that someone finds a way to beat me at my own game, and all that really means is that I would need to find more avenues to strengthen my Scrabble playing abilities. So share, and share alike. If you like, on any of these upcoming posts, feel free to comment your tips and thoughts and tricks that you use while playing. Let us all learn from each other!
I am still compiling a list of topics, and may combine a few topics into a single post depending on length, but watch this space for Scrabble talk in the near future.
One last thing, since Scrabble is a word game after all, why is it called Scrabble? The word itself means, variously, according to the Cambridge English Dictionary, “to use your fingers to quickly find something that you cannot see” or “to try to get something quickly that is not easily available”. I always thought it meant “to claw or tear at” which may be in some other dictionary somewhere. International versions of Scrabble, at least the Swedish version for a time, was called “Alfobet” which seems a much more likely name for a game based on letters and words. However, I can see where the other definitions work as well, as a Scrabble player must quickly come up with words that aren’t readily available with the letters that they have before them, both on rack and on board. In any case, we would have to ask the game’s purchaser, James Brunot, who purchased the game from its inventor American architect Alfred Mosher Butts in 1948 and changed the name from “Criss-crosswords” to “Scrabble”. Only he knows why he chose the more pithy name.
Shake up some letters, pull out your Scrabble board, and let’s get wording!
a simple man 