Smoky and Scrabbly

[avram]

Hung out at Ground; played Scrabble for the first time in I-don’t-remember-how-many years. Came in a close second. This is also the first time I ever played with the formal challenge rules — I challenged the player who made the first move, and won, making her take it back. Later I refrained from challenging the player on my right, even though I had strong doubts about her word, because her play opened up a triple-word-score space for me (though as it turned out, I didn’t have the letters to reach it; instead, I played to make it tough for others to use).

Scrabble rules I didn’t know about:

The starred pink space in the center of the board, the one the first player has to use, is a double-word-score space.

The game ends either when no more plays are possible, or when all the spare tiles are gone and a player uses her last tile.

Your leftover tiles at the end of the game are counted against you. And if one player ended the game by using up all her tiles, she also gets the points for everyone else’s leftovers. (This is how I could have won. I was 9 points behind, and one of the other players has a leftover Q, worth 10 points.)

If I start playing regularly, I’m gonna have to devote some effort to memorizing all those obscure two-letter words that haven’t been used by anybody but Scrabble players for two hundred years.

Comments

Two-letter words

[avram]

I’ve downloaded a program called ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark LEexicon), that has a public-domain words file used by many online Scrabble servers. I’ve grepped it for two-letter words, and here are all 96 of them:

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 re sh si so ta ti to uh um un up us ut we wo xi xu ya ye yo

Re: Two-letter words

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Bah. Yes, I know all those words count. But if I were king, you couldn't use any word for which you did not know the definition.

Re: Two-letter words

[avram]

I know definitions for almost half of them.

Re: Two-letter words

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

A good portion of those are letters in one alphabet or another (including the English one).

Re: Two-letter words

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

This reads like the chants from Snowcrash. Um, I guess an alphabetized chant from Snowcrash.

Now, that's bad -- "He's so obsessive, he alphabetizes his nonsense chants."

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

How long have you been coming to CUGC and never played Scrabble?

Fun words with no vowels

HM, HMM, SH, SHH, CWM.

The formal challenge rules are also refered to as "double" challenges, single ones being where you don't risk losing a turn for an incorrect challenge.

Hasbro has a bunch of word lists here, too:

http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/pl/page.wordlists/dn/home.cfm

[avram]

Well, there’s the thing. To be good at Scrabble among people who take the game seriously, you need to know all those bullshit words. That takes the fun out of it for me.

According to the Scrabble FAQ, UK rules use single challenges, and North American double.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

The official British Scrabble word list--which I think is the "Official Word List", aka "OWL"--includes the word "CH". Apparently, this is a form of the word "I" in some English dialect, usually found in contractions (like "ch'll") and is included in Chambers' Dictionary, which is full of words of questionable existence.

The reason to know the two-letter words is for overlapping; Stephen Fatsis's Word Freak has an example from a tournament where one player played a seven-letter word to begin the game (not uncommon), then the other player played a seven-letter word completely adjacent to it, forming an additional seven two-letter words. This is, obviously, an extreme case.

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

Yep, also you get to do great things like playing the "x" on a triple-letter-score in two directions. Playing a game with heavy stackers (myself and Mr. Tang are both guilty of this) ends up with a very tough board to play, as well.