Scrabble

So is Qi and for X, there's Xi.

while I love scrabble, i must argue that monopoly is the best board game of all time.

Qi is the one I always go with.
It's especially sick if you can get a qi going horizontally and vertically at the same time.

You don't find yourself getting sick of it nearer the end?

I do the same damn thing. Genius.


Once you figure out a few basic strategies of monopoly, and your opponents are blissfully ignorant, you can usually win about sixty-five percent of the time. In one of my MBA papers, I used commonly held fallacies in monopoly and compared them to real-world business fallacies. It was fun to write.

Orange (St. James, New York, Tennessee) is the best group to monopolize, the Greens, (North Carolina, Pacific, Pennsylvannia) are the worst. Utilities are worthless. There's more, but this is way off topic.

I play scrabble about 2 times a week with my wife. We are both pretty good. You can always spot a terrible scrabble player who thinks complicated words are best. Positioning is key in this game. Every time you lay letters down, you need to be spelling at least one word horizontally and one diagonally.

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Edited by merkur - 7/29/11 at 4:43am

played "quay" for 52 points and still lost bad a few weeks ago. Haven't been able to summon the urge to play again.

In my 6th grade class's activity period, we played scrabble for the last 30 minutes of class every day, in teams of two. The teacher had some quality plastic boards, though, which had a grid to hold in the tiles, like a full size version of travel Scrabble boards. It made it much easier to put the game away and continue it later. We even had a copy of the official Scrabble Dictionary.

I still remember my best victory in Scrabble. It was a close game, the bag was empty, and all we had left were C, F, and K, along with maybe 2 other tiles. So me and my teammate are scratching our heads for a bit, when I notice an open U. I whisper to my teammate that I see an opening, and he's not so sure we should do it at first, but we went for it, landing FUCK with a triple word score.

The two girls on the opposing team, of course, tells us we can't write that, and one of the girls raises her hand to tell the teacher. I wasn't worried, though, because I happened to know the word was, in fact, in the official dictionary. (Several classmates I had checked it previously, along with every other dirty word we could think of). Anyway, the teacher comes over, and after seeing the word on the board, she tells us we should put down a different word. I defended our position arguing that we could not see any other words (I think all we had left were consonants), especially for triple word score, and after looking at our letters to try to help she sees we're right. She then said she normally wouldn't allow it, but my partner and I were mature enough to use the word .

One or two turns later it was over, and the girls weren't able to recover from the triple FUCK.

P.S. I did a little research to make sure I had the facts right, but after searching the online version of the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary, the word "fuck" didn't turn up any results . I knew there must be some explanation, though, so I sought out the answer to preserve the credibility of my Scrabble story. I was surprised to find out that the current edition of the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary is censored , but the first two editions were not.
Also, Hasbro still sells a School Scrabble kit like the one my teacher had, which includes six deluxe boards, an official dictionary, and a few other things. It's a shame they don't sell those deluxe boards on their own.

http://isc.ro, anyone? Anyone???

They do sell the deluxe scrabble boards on their own, its called scrabble deluxe, I has it. Before my grandparents lost the plot I used to play against my grandfather, which was pointless. A combination of a medical background, a life travelling in the last days of the empire and a high quality classical education meant he regularly came up with words using all the worst letters simultaneously that no one else had heard of and would have to be searched for at some length in the largest dictionary available. He would sit their quietly confident, and then occasionally criticize the definition given by the dictionary " it's not a Burmese knife used to ceremonially slaughter cattle during the full moon, that's a .... this is used exclusively to slaughter goats" He would regularly go all out using these obscure words and often finish with several times what anyone else scored, and the rest of my family are not exactly stupid. It was the only game he would play apart from boggle (which ended up much the same) and he never lost, it did make family gatherings a little frustrating sometimes. It is however an awesome game, and I get childlike joy trying to get swear/obscene words in.

Pretty sure you don't get points for words spelled diagonally.