I have for the last 4 years or so played Scrabble at my house with 3 girlfriends every Thursday night. They are called my “Scrabble ho’s” or “Scrabble Bitches” but are basically best mates - and my SO gets us dinner these nights and we play 2 games of SuperScrabble (huge board) and finish up about 10.00pm. Now, my conscience dilemma is that I refuse to use the Scrabble dictionaries to find the best word for my letters. Ergo, I always lose.
Question: should I pore over said dictionaries until I find the 7 letter word for my tiles or should I only use the dictionary when I am challenged?
I am aware of the rules of the game but they flaunt the rules because they can? I am tempted to play by their rules which means 20 minutes per turn until they put down the perfect 7 letter word or do I whack down the highest point scoring word I can?
By the way, I am prepared to kill them all and bury them in my sizeable backyard. Dopers, please advise.
Oh la! Yes they use the bloody things. They look at their tiles and see COLZANT and use their dictionaries to play the word COLZA on a triple with the Z and thereby screw me because I had a word that could have really used the A. But didn’t. So there they are, all of my 3 beautiful girlfriends using the books that I can’t because it isn’t in the spirit of the game. For goodness’ sake, when was the last time you used AVEIRANT? I don’t even know what it means. But apparently ‘it’s in the book’. I believe that if you cant’use it in a sentence, don’t use it! Or am I harsh?
You should all be following the same rules. So either you need to change or they do. What’s the easier proposition? Can you stomach playing the way they do?
Could I? Would I? Change to their rules? I don’t know. Because they are my favourite people in the world. Kinda like a best friend who borrows your best top to go out and brings it back with questionable stains. I mean it’s my house we play at every night, and for the other three it is an escape from children and their husbands for a night away. Also, they are all secret smokers. Maybe that’s my attraction?
Sorry, I meant that that’s their attraction to me, not that I’m a secret smoker! Because I am a public smoker after 6.00pm (I don’t smoke before) and when people say to me “did you smoke when you were pregnant,” I can say “He was 10lb - what do you think!”
Browsing the dictionary for words to play seems like cheating. I’ve never heard of anyone playing that way, and it’s kind of missing the point of the game. Hell, why not have a laptop with an Internet connection on hand and use one of those anagram generators?
Alternatively, you could just memorize the entire Oxford English Dictionary. That’d show them Scrabble Bitches! Dayum!
I think the major thing is slowing down of gameplay. If their turns were 5 minutes instead of 20, for example (even if that’s an exaggeration,) if they didn’t look it up it would improve my enjoyment of the game vastly. It’s one thing to look up a questionable word you’re not sure is legit, it’s another to search through alphabetically until you find a word that fits your letters.
We’ve always played that the dictionary can only be used when there’s a challange to a word put down. After all, if their method is fair, you should be able to use a computer anagram program to get the best permutation everytime. However, many times “house rules” will develop that aren’t part of the lgitimate game rules. How many people here play monopoly with a pot in the middle?
Don’t be a pushover. If there are different house rules for this game, play by those house rules. If they only like you because they can beat you, that isn’t really affection.
In the home of BBS2K a dictionary can only be used to settle the charge of inventing a word. I was very happy with myself when I was challenged on a word and won recently ; the word was “eluate”.
Burying them in your backyard would be a mistake…it’s the first place the police will look when all three of them turn up missing at the same time.
It’s been ages since I played Scrabble, except for an online tournament on another message board a year or so ago. I’ve never heard of using a dictionary to look up words during your turn. It does seem like cheating to me; I didn’t even try to use any online help (well, except to verify that a word existed before I used it) during the tournament. Sitting around while someone pages through a dictionary is not my idea of a fun way to play Scrabble.
Though I think using dictionaries during play is absurd,if they are set on using them I would set a strict time limit per move,say 5 minutes,I use to let weaker opponents use the dictionary but couldn’t stand the boredom as they searched for a word,so i told them 3 minutes,we even had a timer that was set.
Do you know all the two letter words? They are the most important words in the game,learn those and you will have a big advantage over dictionary users.
I must admit I’ve never heard of using the Scrabble dictionary during a turn before. I’ve only ever seen it used when challenged. I always thought the point was to use your vast pantheon of grammatical warriors to prove your superior loquaciousness unaided. Using the dictionary while playing just seems to defeat the purpose – it becomes more of a word search than a battle of wits.
In the scrabble game I have for my PDA, there is a “suggest” feature that will suggest the best word for your present set of tiles, but it explicitly states that this is considered cheating.
Still, if your friends are doing it then I see no reason that you shouldn’t, too. Either agree to all use it or not use it unless challenged, otherwise it’s a bit of a lopsided challenge.
Using a dictionary in Scrabble is only allowed in response to a challenge.
There is no rule about having to use the word in a sentence.
You are not harsh to want to play by the rules.
If they insist on cheating, use a computer.
Anyway, if your friends upset you by cheating, why don’t you politely tell them?
In my house, those would be called cheaters. Dictionaries are used after tiles are laid. And only the concise OED or Websters, none of these fancy Scrabblecentric dictionaries.
Of course, it’s a rare game where I crack 400 that way, but I usually get 300+.
Prepare and memorize lists of all two and three letter words. It’ll do wonderful things for your score, without the need for cheaty dictionary lookups.
Exactly. When playing Scrabble, one only uses the dictionary to check a word that has been challenged. In our house, that means whatever dictionary that happens to be on hand. We’ve played with unabridged dictionaries and outdated dictionaries as well as ones that were concise and up to date.
Looking up words to use in play is considered cheating in all the games that I’ve ever played, and I wonder where your friends got this bizarre rule.
And then none of you should consult dictionaries except in response to a challenge, like the (very brief and easy) rules of the game say. The rules aren’t a set of shibboleths (shibbolethim?) drawn up to keep the game from being played the way it’s meant to be played; they define what the game is that you are playing.
Here’s the way I’ve always played (that is in contravention of the offical rules):
*Dictionaries used by all players.
No loss-of-play on invalid words.
Play until all tiles are played (as opposed to until the first player has played all available tiles).
In over 30 years, those are the rules I’ve always played under, and I’ve never had anyone who disagreed with them. IMO, it’ supposed to be fun and maybe even educational. But YMMV.
*Heck, I’d even be OK with using a laptop with an anagram generator (like the “word builder” on the Scrabble website itself.)
If all the dictionaries get stored at your house every week, can’t they conveniently come up “missing” one week? Just one week, to see how they react and cope?
