One of my new years resolutions was to go out more more, socialize and meet more people. Luckily it’s the one resolution I’ve actually stuck to doing. And it’s been rewarding in one of the ways I’ll be talking about in this post.
Most of the events I’ve gone to has involved games at some point in the event and board games definitely are always there.
The one I seem to always enjoy is SCRABBLE. I play it at almost every game I go to because it’s the one board game I know how to play.
I tried chess one time, but that didn’t go well cos it was my first time and I wasn’t really paying attention to the lesson as the chess instructor was talking. 
Anyways back to scrabble. As you can see from the pictures, scrabble is a board game and it’s played by forming words with letter tiles each player receives.
At the start of the game, each player is given these rod stack on which they’ll arrange the tiles they’ve been given. Next, each player fills up their stack with their letter tiles and you play in rounds.
The first person to play starts at a designated spot in the middle of the board. If you look closely in the image below here, that spot is where the letter L is resting on. From there, everyone else forms words branching out from the words already formed on the board. You can’t start a new word on your own unless at least one letter from the new word joins the maze already on the board.
But what’s the point of playing? How do you tell who the winner is? Well…If you watch carefully, you’ll see that each letter tile has a number written at the base of the tile. You score a number of points based on the letters you form on the board. So for instance, if I formed the word MERE that’ll give me a total point of (2+1+1) corresponding to the sum of the numbers of the letters.
Using letters which are difficult to make words with like X for instance rewards you well. What this does is that is that it encourages you to form more words with those complex letters because you get more points for doing that.
Also, if you look closely on the board, you’ll see spots with things like “Letter Double” , “Letter Triple” “Mot Double” or “Mot Triple” written on them. These are french for Double Letter, Triple Letter, Double Word and Triple Word respectively. They’re written in french because I guess this was made for or by francophone countries. But what they basically mean is that every time you form a word with one of the letters landing on one of these special spots, you multiply the number on the letter by two if “double letter” is written on that spot, and by 3 if “triple letter”, or you might even multiply the sum of all the letter of the word by a certain number if any of your words land on a “double word” or “triple word”.
So many fucking rules and cheat codes. When I just started, these were some of the tips I didn’t know and that was why I lost so many times.
Since I started playing, I’ve been getting better and better every time I play. The first game I played, I lost. We played 3 rounds in that game and I lost them all. Luckily though that was where my losing ended.
The first game I played, everyone but me at the table had played SCRABBLE before. So this was when I learned the rules and how to play. And just like with everything else in life, experience just puts you at an advantage. To the rest of them, all they were thinking of was forming words. But I was doing more than that. I had to make sure that I wasn’t only forming words, but also remembering the rules I just learnt to make sure I don’t violate them as I play and so that I can maximize my points too.
I also struggled because I was facing the direction the direction the board faced. Forming words in scrabble is one thing, but not sitting facing the board directly adds an extra layer of difficulty to it.
I like scrabble for many reasons. The most important being that it serves it’s purpose a game in the sense that it’s fun. But also, your vocabulary increases as you play more games, especially if you’re playing with experts or people good with words.
Like chess though, scrabble challenges you to not only know words, but have flexible strategies to be able to maximize your points. Anyone would be able to play if it was just about words. But the winner is obviously the one with the better strategies. The winner can form only four letter words through out the game but with complex letter with high points like words containing X. STRATEGY MATTERS!!!
Scrabble is a really interesting board game and if you haven’t tried it before, it’s a good brain trainer imo. And don’t worry about all the rules and cheat codes: you’ll learn as you play.