Category: Gaming

Scrabble: Luck of the Draw

Last month, I wrote about my love of the board game Scrabble. You can click this link to read all about it. I believe Scrabble to be a fun, challenging, and mentally rewarding game to play. I am endeavoring to share tips that I have learned along a 30+ year career of playing Scrabble. If you don’t play that often, I would encourage you to play, even against an AI, to keep your brain engaged, which is always a good thing.

The game of Scrabble begins with blind-drawing seven letters, usually from a bag, though some people like to lay them out face down in the box lid and choose from there. However you draw, you shouldn’t see the letters, and should draw as randomly as possible. If playing an AI, the game will draw for you. Ideally, there is nothing you should be able to do to influence the letters that you draw at the beginning or throughout the game. For me, this is part of the excitement (simultaneously also the frustration) of playing. I never know what I am going to get, and that both gives and takes away.

What makes a good set of 7 letters or a bad one? Usually a bad draw includes low point value letters, repeated letters, or letters that are difficult to utilize (“C” and “V” and “I” come to mind right away, even though “C” and “V” are worth 3 and 4 points, respectively, they don’t form two letter words and thus are slightly harder to play. More on that later). A good draw has more frequently used vowels (“A” and “E”) and a good mix of other letters, and hopefully a few higher point letters.

Fortunately, a game mechanism exists for replacing a terrible draw: the exchange. Players can, on any turn, choose letters they have previously drawn (up to the entire 7) and exchange them with blind letters from the pool of undrawn letter tiles. This allows you to, potentially, improve a hand (though plenty of times I have drawn differently yet equally frustrating letters). I have a few rules of thumb for when to exchange letters. First, I do it rarely as it costs a turn to do so; the player who exchanges letters does not get to actually play a word when they exchange. Depending on how advanced your opponents or the AI, this could result in a deficit of points that will need to be surmounted throughout the rest of the game.

Second, I usually do not exchange an “E” or an “S” tile, as these are very versatile and useful letters, but I am ruthless about the rest of the letters I exchange. Even if I have a 3-point or higher letter, if I haven’t or can’t make a word with it, it needs to go. Generally I find that the more letters I exchange at a go, the better chance I have of drawing a few useful letters that I can play on my next turn. I usually always will exchange a blank tile, even though that can be any letter, because it also doesn’t gain any points. Again, it goes back to the number of tiles I am exchanging, and as there are only two blanks, my chances of acquiring a letter tile with a point value is high. By the way, if I have multiple “E” tiles, I will only keep one, and exchange the rest.

I usually only wait through one turn of suffering with a less than ideal 7 letters before exchanging. The longer I go trying to make shorter words for (usually) less points in hopes of drawing one or two good letters, the more damaging it is to exchange letters. It compounds the problem: with terrible letters, one cannot make good, high-point words, and losing a turn to exchange letters after a few turns of no good words played usually ends in a point deficit that could have been avoided by losing a turn right away and coming back strong with better letters.

Beyond that, sometimes the best you can do is play the letters you have. They may not be what you want, or be the coveted high point letters, but if you can make words and keep the points accumulating, do so. Don’t exchange just hoping to find the “J”, “Q”, or “Z”, in other words. Play words as often as you have them to play, and let the luck of the draw of new letters come to you as you play through. I have found that Scrabble is a game of ups and downs, and that playing with serviceable, though perhaps less than ideal, letters is better than constantly trying to draw the perfect letters.

In summary, exchange letters rarely, and when you do, exchange as many letters as possible, keeping only a single “E” or “S” if already acquired. I’ve found that this yields the best possible replacement set of letters for getting right back into the criss-crosswords action of Scrabble.

Scrabble

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!