Scrabble
Never a cross word
For some reason, this lexiconic leviathan has been criminally ignored when it comes to compiling lists of the greatest games1. Put it down to years of family fights over the OED (they might as well call it Squabble), or a reputation for attracting po-faced, serious and worthy players – that’s “word slingers” to you, sunshine – at international tournaments. Or that covert, crafty it’s-good-for-you quality (as you improved your game, you expanded your vocabulary – up to a point, that is. No one ever dropped a QAT or ZEK into a conversation at the grocers. Not unless they wanted bruised spuds and a stunted cucumber).
And yet…
It was a game that starred in some of the biggest sitcoms ever made (from Seinfeld to The Simpsons – hell, even as far back as Steptoe & Son they were warming over the old “pass off a made-up word as real” Scrabble schtick for cheap laughs). It’s numbered Sting, Keanu Reeves and Mel Gibson amongst its devotees and been issued in twenty-eight different languages. Including Welsh!
Our greatest literary figures have invoked Scrabble (look up Shakespeare’s Merry Wives Of Windsor, Act II Scene I, where the Mistresses check out Falstaff’s gigantic set: “I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank space for different names”2). Lewis Carroll reckoned he invented it. Douglas Adams had it determining the Ultimate Question Of Life, The Universe And Everything (“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”).
So we salute Scrabble, game of champions and the only place you could ever score with benzoxycamphor, diazohydroxide or oxyphenbutazone. Unless you spent your youth outside Camden Market on a Tuesday afternoon, that is.
Steve
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We had a scrabble club in our school where all the bullied children use to hide out (bullies don't like scrabble the amount of letters confuses them). I became the champion due to my uncanny knowledge of two letter words (the only one I remeber now bar the 'normals' is qa and I can't remeber what it means. I thinks it's currency) and the knoweldge of q's without u's (see qa).
Personally I don't like the game, it always ended in upset people and a upset board.
Saying that I do have the great game of Equality, it's scrabble but with numbers. You get a pile of numbers and make sums with them that equal another sum on the board. The game finished quickly when I recieved two zeros and contructed the biggest equation possible each with a x0 on the end. My brother wouldn't play after that.
For example: 'sun' became 'suntan'.
Then 'suntanoil'.
Then 'suntanoiled'.
And finally, ludicrously, 'unsuntanoiled'. Help, doctor, I've just been unsuntanoiled.
The other had an almost blank grid to play in the normal sense, but scoring per letter only because none of the letter tiles had points on them. The squares diagonal to the centre one had anchors on them for some reason.
Without any other explantion here was also an A-Z of things on the edges of the board, like one of those wall charts often seen in nursery schools.
I was a bit stunned when the Welsh dubbed Trumpton translated "Pugh, Pugh, barney Mcgrew" into "Ned, Ned, Uncle Fred"...