Scrabble enthusiasts may find some interest in reading about a whimsical experiment in which I recently took part. My brother and I share a house, and have sequential games of Scrabble more or less continually on the go. (All thoughts which follow, are about Scrabble between only two players.)
We recently exchanged observations about the way in which at times, large areas of the board are made inaccessible for laying out of words in: by virtue of the way the game happens to go – which letters the players draw, when; and sometimes, both players refrain from such opening-up as might be possible, for fear of letting the other in and enabling him to “clean up” scoring-wise, in that part of the board. This situation can be felt as an interesting – or sometimes maddening – constraint / challenge. Under such conditions, one might (briefly) entertain thoughts of self-sacrifice – playing a very low-scoring word, in order to open up for both players, a thus “blocked” area; even if the result would be some high scoring for one’s opponent. We decided to try an experiment by which we played a non-competitive round of Scrabble – for this one round, altogether ignoring scores: no point in scoring, with the object being not to try to beat the other guy, but to work together to make as much as possible of the board, open and available for play.
Brother is a more competitive character than me, and tried pretty much as he does in normal play, to create ingenious high-scoring stuff (even though we weren’t scoring); I was more laid-back – trying for words of decent length and breaking new ground on the board, but not greatly sweating it. Things went rather more quickly than in our normal games, but not hugely more so. Approaching the end, we had words in plenty – longish ones (often five or six letters) predominating more than usual; and a good spread, of use of not far off the whole board: biggest unoccupied area was three adjacent horizontal rows of five squares each, in the lower middle of the board (three rows, occupied, between the lowest of these “fives”, and the bottom of the board).
At the end-game, brother went “out” first: I was left with four letters (IKMW) – as we weren’t scoring, no need felt to be particularly frantic to get rid of big-scoring letters before the end. He suggested that with our doing things as we were, I might as well play my remaining letters: that was possible in two goes, making KID and MEW – the K of KID went on to the end of the abovementioned three hitherto “virgin” rows of five. At the very end, we had used only two out of the eight triple-word squares – since not scoring, no particular incentive to reach out and use them !
Unsurprisingly – we found this an interesting thing to try once, but very far from thrilling. Of some interest to observe what happened, when “doing” Scrabble in this way.