Scrabble, let’s be honest, is a wonderful game. There’s nothing more satisfying that laying down a big ol’ 7-letter word that jacks up your score and blocks your opponents from the best squares and drives them insane because you blocked all the Us and they’re stuck with the Q. (Remember, kids: “Qat” is a word.)
I’m not like a champion or anything but I play at every opportunity. The time I laid down a 140-point word may well have been the happiest moment of my entire life. We got a travelling Scrabble kit so we wouldn’t miss any chances to play. I got a video game Scrabble so I could play on the plane.
The game is so simple, and yet so fiendishly deep. Strategic and tactical decisions await at every turn.
I’m in. Mr. TeaElle and I played a killer game of Scrabble on Christmas night, and I beat him with “zydeco” with a Double Word Score. That put us at dead tied, 20 games to 20, for 2004. Not a bad record to end with.
I wish it were easier to play online for Mac users.
Love Scrabble (please mentally insert symbol indicating that Scrabble (please mentally insert symbol indicating it’s a trademark) is a trademark), but not so much the strategy involved in the game. I don’t decry fiercely competitive Scrabble, in fact I kind of admire it, but I also like the fact that the game lends itself so well to cooperative educational play as well. My kids and I play regular Scrabble, Geography Scrabble (all place names), Biography Scrabble (first or last names or both in one turn if you can, but you must be able to explain to us who you’re talking about), and a dozen others. Our current favorite is Story Scrabble, in which anything goes, but each word must be used in a sentence that continues a story that began with the first player’s turn. We don’t keep score, and we love the game anyway.
I Love Scrabble! It’s in my genes; my late grandmother was a Scrabble shark. One night, my stepmother and I played against her. She kicked our butts from here to Myanmar. The next morning, Dad asked us how the game went;
“Grandma won.”
“Of course she won. That’s not even a question.”
“Well, she beat me by 100 points and Reen by 80.”
“Oh. She must have been tired.”
I’ve been to the National Championships I just need a small country to adopt me,it’s a lot easier than trying to get into the British World Squad.A guy at school kept beating me at chess,so I taught him Scrabble.Now he’s been into the World Championships at Sydney and Las Vegas.Meh!
I normally get about 400.Best so far is 617
Anybody else ever played Super Scrabble? I got it for Christmas this year. It’s similar to regular Scrabble, but there are more tiles, and the board’s extended by about three or four squares in each direction and includes quadruple-letter and -word squares. Lots of fun.
Count me in. Next to Boggle and Monopoly, it’s my favorite game. I’ve been dying to pick up Super Scrabble, but I’ve yet to do so. The problem is, I really don’t have anyone to play against. Growing up, I played countless games of Scrabble with my mom and grandmother. Always got my ass kicked by them – just like in Boggle – until around high school, when the tables started turning.
I do wish I had a better vocabulary of those really strange, obscure words because that can really help you out when you’ve got a horrible rack of tiles (like a “Q” without a “U”, fer instance). If I play Scrabble with my cousin, he and I usually pass the Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary back and forth like a hot potato during the whole game. Of course, we’re not looking up to see if it’s a word – we’re just “double-checking the spelling.” Yeah, that’s it.
I love Boggle, Scrabble and UpWords… yeah, UpWords is an awesome game. It’s a lot like Scrabble, only you can change the words by stacking tiles on top of other letters to form a new word.
I need to buy that one and bring it into the office.
That, and Super Boggle (?).
And while I love Monopoly, it takes forever to play. Not that that’s a bad thing, but can’t play it over the lunch hour.
I was a good casual player all my life until The Factotrix and I started dating. She wanted to play once, and I thought, “Hmm, this won’t be fair. She does poorly in Jeopardy, doesn’t read many books, and likes Adam Sandler movies. I, on the other hand, wrote for a weekly 'zine for two years, read anything that’s within reach, and routinely correct people mispelling words and offer other words for them to use instead.” And I was right, it wasn’t fair. She kicked my ass, by about 200 points.
The key, I have learned, is not knowing the big words. Sure, a triple-triple can put you beyond reach, but how often do those happen? No, you’ve got to master the two- and three-letter words. That way you’re almost always guaranteed a mitt-full of points each turn, and if you run a five letter word in parallel with another five or more letter word, you’ve just created ten words. And the u-less Q words. There are a lot more of them besides qat.
I devoured Stefan Fatsis’s book Word Freak and started a serious study program to get better at Scrabble. Now, after three years, I’m winning about 1/3 of our matches, and rarely lose by more than 50 points. I just wish there was a Scrabble club close enough to the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area I could join. (I think there’s one in Richmond, but getting from here to there and back again isn’t as easy as it seems, with the big mess I-64 is.) I’d love to be a tournament player.
Gah, how could I forget backgammon? There’s a sweet new LOTR-themed backgammon set out now. Between it and the other LOTR-themed games, a guy could go broke…
I’m surprised I’ve never played UpWords. Always looked like it’d be a blast. You know, Dazz, we’re gonna need to have a nice game stash especially when the office move comes!
Anyone ever play Literati on yahoo.com? I play it with friends some time, it’s pretty fun. The only problem I have with it is they use dictionary.com instead of the official Scrabble dictionary, and a few of the 2 and three letter words accepted in the Scrabble dictionary aren’t accepted by dictionary.com so I’ve lost a few games because words I traditionally use in scrabble are unavailable.
I love Scrabble, too! I’ve been playing it since I was a kid, and now my wife and I play on the game my grandmother bought in the '60s, and keep score on the pad with her writing (and also my mother’s) on it. My wife spells as well as I do, but it comes down to the tiles you get. It took a few years for it to happen, but she did finally beat me at it.
I am so happy. I just found a low-vision version of Scrabble online. It has a larger board, larger tiles and everything is printed black on white for maximum visibility. I am going to get it for my legally-blind mom for her 80th birthday next month. She loves Scrabble, but it has gotten harder and harder for her to play.
I just need a small country to adopt me,it’s a lot easier than trying to get into the British World Squad.A guy at school kept beating me at chess,so I taught him Scrabble.Now he’s been into the World Championships at Sydney and Las Vegas.Meh!