What do a nickname for pizza and Chinese medicine’s vital energy concept have in common? They’re definitions of ‘ZA’ and ‘QI’, two of the highest-scoring two-letter words playable in Scrabble.
For the uninitiated, Scrabble is a word-based board game, where between two and four players score points by contributing to a crossword-like structure of interconnected words. Players’ scores are determined by the value of the letter-tiles used to form words and the placement of those tiles on “premium” squares which yield higher rewards (multiplying the score of the word or letter by a factor of two or three).
Over the festive season, more than a few of us will find ourselves sitting in front of a tile-adorned rack and a 15 x 15 gridded game board – some more readily than others.
The validity of words played in Scrabble is dictated by designated dictionaries. Ambitious Scrabble players typically memorise the 127 valid two-letter words and as many as they can of the 1,351 three-letterers. The pay-off of this rote learning is achieving multiple counted words per play. Instead of playing a word that intersects with a previous word at just one point (say, forming AXE by vertically adding X and E to the A at the end of ZEBRA), players can run a word alongside an existing word, so they achieve a score for the main new word, but also for all the additional mini perpendicular words formed. AXE can sit directly alongside the ZEB part of ZEBRA, so instead of just scoring for AXE, you get “hook” scores for ZA, EX, and BE as well, which is much more rewarding of one’s efforts.
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Advanced players also give a lot of energy to “Bingo-ing”, which is the act of playing all seven tiles on the rack at once and gaining a 50-point bonus in so doing.
Once it was a game that benefited verbose, poetical types, but a few decades of competitive hammering into its rules have shown that some combination of a keen eye, a good memory and robotic proceduralism are actually key. It’s more syntax than semantics
Not everyone enjoys playing the game in this more computational way. There was a time in my life where I knew the two-letter words and a lot of the valuable three-letter ones. On a trip home from London for Christmas via Yorkshire one year, my (to my mind great) performance in a game with family up there led to my being deemed “indecent” by my beloved auntie Pat. Others challenged my words – looking them up in the dictionary. When they found the offending item, they would ask me to define it, or use it in a sentence, and when I couldn’t, they scoffed. They clearly felt I shouldn’t be able to play words that I didn’t understand. However, this is not the rule in Scrabble.
It led me to believe that there are basically two different kinds of game being played on the world’s Scrabble boards.
There’s one, competitive, formulaic game that adheres to and exploits the official rules. It’s essentially a Boolean business with two categories, legitimate words and illegitimate words.
Then there’s another somewhat quaint version which celebrates nice, long words, and cares about being able to define words and use them out in the wild. This second version likely benefits people with better vocabularies and more expansive knowledge (spelling well is also a plus), and, in my experience, such people often don’t like losing games to people who don’t really know what QUIXOTRY is.
Similarly, I remember adoring Sudoku when it first arrived in major European newspapers in 2004, and frequently urging people to try it, only to be met with responses like, “I’m not good with numbers.” There was a mistaken idea that there is something inherently numerical about Sudoku because it uses 1-9 as its symbols. However, that’s largely arbitrary and you could really just use any distinguishable group of signs and it would be the same game. It’s logical, not mathematical.
Something similar might be said of Scrabble. Once it was a game that benefited verbose, poetical types, but a few decades of competitive hammering into its rules have shown that some combination of a keen eye, a good memory and robotic proceduralism are actually key. It’s more syntax than semantics. That’s not to say it’s not artful or creative. The right balance of memory and strategy is of course masterful, but it’s not just about being the best speller at the table or knowing long words.
Last November, runner up in this year’s World Scrabble Championship, New Zealander Nigel Richards, won the Spanish-language Scrabble world championship. Richards – an elusive figure (so much so that commentators often gleefully celebrate when the mics manage to pick up almost anything he says to an opponent), and unquestionably one of the most successful Scrabble players of all time – doesn’t speak Spanish. The Spanish title wasn’t a huge shock among fans of the game, not least since Richards has form, having previously won the francophone title, again without speaking the language. This is someone who definitely can’t “use it in a sentence”.
In fact, Richards got started in Scrabble when his mother, fed up of his card-counting ruining any sense of competition between them in their weekly games of 500, suggested they play Scrabble, reportedly saying “I know a game you’re not going to be very good at, because you can’t spell very well and you weren’t very good at English at school.” The poor woman probably misses the cards.
It’s natural to think, if you’re the kind of guy who can pretty much memorise a foreign-language dictionary for the purposes of winning a tournament (which Richards reportedly did in nine weeks for the French competition), why don’t you just use that brainpower to do something else – learn the language, for starters? I think that idea gets at something integral in the politics of gaming. For lots of people, there seems to be something relatively ignoble about having the kind of brain that can do what Richards’s can, and then using it to win Scrabble tournaments. It draws out a kind of gamer vs non-gamer intuition about laudable uses of time (and indeed, incredible cognitive power).
Or perhaps it brings out a bit of snobbery in prolix types, who find it frustrating to see computational techniques triumph in an ostensibly verbal game. It’s probably not shocking to learn that the person who beat Nigel Richards in this year’s final, Adam Logan, is a mathematician with a Harvard PhD. Some people, even incredibly brilliant people, just really like playing – and winning – games.
At the higher level, there is an enormous amount of strategic complexity that is more artful than may be appreciated by those who bemoan this kind of play. I’ve mentioned memorising important words, but a little investigation of the world of competitive Scrabble (I recommend the documentary Word Wars as an introduction) will quickly lead one down the rabbit hole of board dynamics and endgame skill. Watching coverage of this year’s finals brought me into contact with the delicious phrase “vowel-undoubling”, and a summary of the outcome of game four yielded the following majestic Wikipedia sentence: “In the fourth game, Adam played bingo INERTIA after Nigel sensationally misplaced SHERIAT for a phony that he had to remove for zero points.”
It is, quite simply, a wonderful subculture, and reader, I hope you will play a little over the holidays. But perhaps more importantly, I hope the people at your board will be playing the same game as you.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a research fellow at TCD’s Long Room Hub.
