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.
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