2.10: Scrabble and more - Word games

Alas, I have missed my first post of the year. This was due almost entirely to my family being sick—first the girls, then my wife and I, and then the girls again. Regardless, we’ve had the opportunity to play a number of games I the past couple of weeks; we also had a small get-together for my wife’s birthday, during which even more games were played. We also barbecued some carne asada, but if you want to hear about that, you have to read my other blog, “Asada Quest.”

I don’t know how it happened, looking back over the last month or two, I realized we had played a large number of word games.  Most people are familiar with Scrabble—this is an excellent game, and an excellent example of many of the mechanics in a word game.  You get a random assortment of letters, and must arrange them to form a word—in Scrabble you often want the longest word or the word that uses the rarer letters (those letters worth more points--), but you also have to watch board position. A common mechanic among the games covered today, words are built upon each other in a crossword type fashion, interlocked by a single shared letter. 

One of the biggest drawbacks to playing word games is that they favor people with large vocabularies and people that spell well.  While I'm no slouch in either of these areas, I've played people that put me to horrible shame.  Did you know that Ibex is a word?  Did you know it scores ten-gazillion points if placed on the correct spot on a Scrabble board.

A friend of ours, Robert, recently introduced us to Bananagrams.  Bananagrams was designed by Abe and Rena Nathanson; it was published in 2006, and supports 1 to 8 players.  This game consists of 144 bakelite-type tiles which are similar in size and shape to the Scrabble letter tiles, and an appropriately designed bag.  In this game, players place their letters as in Scrabble, placing words horizontally and vertically--but as quickly as possible.  That's right, no turns, this game is a speed game.  When a player has placed all their letters, they shout "Split", and all players must draw another tile from the pile in the center.  Words can be removed or rearranged; if a player finds themselves unable to use a tile, they may discard it to the center of the table, but must draw three to replace it.  The game ends when when there aren't enough tiles in the draw pile for all players--at this point the first person to use up all their tiles and declare "Bananas" is the winner.

Coincidentally we recently acquired the predecessor to Bananagrams, a game called Pick Two!   Pick Two! was designed by Gary Gatchel and first published in 1993. It supports 2-6 players; it contains 180 thin plastic tiles and a scorepad. This game functions almost exactly as Bananagrams, except that when someone has used all their letters, they shout "Pick Two," and all players draw two tiles instead of the one drawn in Bananagrams. There are also wild tiles, which function as the blank tiles in Scrabble do. Lastly and most significantly, the tiles all have a number on the bottom; when the round has ended, all players with unused letters add up these numbers and score that many points--the player with the lowest score after five rounds is the winner.

This post is getting long, so I'll end this shortly; there are a number of other word games to visit. To those who have difficulty in word games, I make this suggestion—memorize the two-letter word list. Yes, it's 96 words, but it’s ridiculous how much easier word games become when you know even a few. You may also notice that there are no two-letter words that contain the letters C or V. 

AA AB AD AE AG AH AI AL AM AN AR AS AT AW AX AY BA BE BI BO

BY DE DO ED EF EH EL EM EN ER ES ET EX FA GO HA HE HI HM HO

ID IF IN IS IT JO KA LA LI LO MA ME MI MM MO MU MY NA NE NO

NU OD OE OF OH OM ON OP OR OS OW OX OY PA PE PI QI RE SH SI

SO TA TI TO UH UM UN UP US UT WE WO XI XU YA YE YO

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Time to publish this thing--I should get it in just under the wire. Have a good week everyone, don't forget to drink your ovaltine.


Pictures borrowed from Boardgamegeek.
Two-letter word list is available from a number of different sites.