Flutterby™! : Word Wars 2006-11-22 14:51:29.330545+00

Word Wars

2006-11-22 14:51:29.330545+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

A few nights ago, Charlene and I watched Word Wars, a documentary about four players at the highest levels of tournament play Scrabble. It was entertaining to put faces and mannerisms to the names that we became acquainted when reading in Word Freak, but overall it has put a damper on our enjoyment of Scrabble. We've seen what's necessary to take the game to the next level and, much as spending hours to master that tricky combo move in a console video game, we're just not interested in going there.

I played with a scrabble freak a couple years ago. She did things like memorize all 2-letter words in the official dictionary. I did learn the art of starting words with 'S' and tacking it at the end of an existing word. It's how you really rack up points. But the game wasn't fun when she'd lay down a single letter scoring 50+ points because it spelled two words and the double word square counted twice.

And it's really not about vocabulary, it's about a set of symbols that are often better throught of as not words. Talk with the better players and they'll play words that they know because of their playability, but have no idea of their definition.

But, yeah, next step for us would be to memorize all of the two and three letter words (the "X" two-letter ones are "AX", "EX", "OX", "XU", "XI", one of those latter two is a Vietnamese currency), the 5 and longer letter words with Q (already have the "Q" words without "U"), and it no longer has general purpose application.

I mean, some of the strategizing is fun, Charlene scored something like 68 points with three letters the last game we played ("X" on a triple letter score played both ways, which I was foolish to leave her, but I'd gotten there with a play on a triple word score), but it's really not a game about words at all.