The Davis Square Community

Beer and Scrabble in the park!

From:

lbmango.livejournal.com

No, for scrabble in the park you need hard liquor. Tequila and scrabble in the park!

Drunken Scrabble FTW

From:

"Drunken" would be an awesome starting word. :-)

Part of me kind of wants to coordinate a Davis Square Drunken Scrabble meetup...

From:

Am I the only person who loves board games but hates Scrabble?

From:

lbmango.livejournal.com

No, this is why we do it while drunk

I don't think that Scrabble works as a drinking game (drink for every vowel? every point below 20? dunno) but playing ONCE drunk, and maybe double word score for booze-related words?

From:

Or just socially drinking and playing.

From:

Yes.

From:

You just need to play it right.

A liberal-arts-geek ex of mine loved games but hated Scrabble, because he said it was a math game disguised as a word game. Then I invented Strip Scrabble and it completely changed his outlook.

From:

Funny, that's exactly my opposition to scrabble; it's an easy algorithm to implement, but it requires memorization of a lengthy list of arbitrary letter combinations. I have a pretty decent vocabulary, but the hash goes from meanings to words, rather than from letter groups to legal anagrams thereof.

Sign me up for strip scrabble. :)

From:

So in other words, you don't like it because you object to the underlying math the scoring system is based on? Or because you can't play letters at random?

From:

Specifically because the scoreable token patterns are effectively arbitrary. i.e. one could just as easily publish a list of legal letter combinations that have nothing to do with English for use as game words (or, indeed, with letters at all) and the solving algorithm is not fundamentally changed. The game isn't a word game, it's an anagram-solving game.

I've got no problem with the underlying math, but then, I haven't sat down and actually compared the number values on the tiles to the frequency of appearance of those letters in the word list.

Most of my undergraduate work was in game solving algorithms, and I'll completely admit that this has ruined some board games for me irreparably. It's also seriously increased my enjoyment of others, however.
Really,

surrealestate has the right of it. It needs to be played with a nudity incentive. And booze. On Drinkin' Island.

From:

i.e. one could just as easily publish a list of legal letter combinations that have nothing to do with English for use as game words (or, indeed, with letters at all) and the solving algorithm is not fundamentally changed.

Why do I get the feeling that I'm not going to be the first person to say to you that while I understand what you're saying, I also happen to feel you've missed the fundamental point of the game?

From:

I don't know that I've missed it, I just don't find it compelling, which isn't the same thing.

From:

Well, I certainly can't make it compelling for you, so I won't try. :-)

From:

tober.livejournal.com

I completely agree with you about Scrabble. My mother and her husband love Scrabble and they say to me "You have a huge vocabulary and you like word games. You should like Scrabble." I don't like it, however, and would argue that Scrabble is about as much a "word game" as bowling is a "ball game." When I'm in the mood for a word game, I want a game that involves the exercise of language skill, such as a crossword puzzle. I have a similar sort of antipathy toward sudoku - every time I do one I wind up thinking "This is tedious. I should write a piece of software to do it so I don't have to."

That all being said, strip Scrabble with

surrealestate would be ok. Or actually better than ok. Unfortunately, I bet she has a much better knowledge of the esoteric and practically useless (in ordinary life) high-scoring two, three, and four letter words in the Scrabble lexicon than I do.

From:

FWIW, I do alright despite not being into the memorization thing at all -- embarrassingly, I don't even know all the 2-letters definitively, in fact.

And yes, of course there is math involved, but I think mostly people get all object-y because they resent the fact that they suck at it despite a good vocabulary and a belief that they are good at games. I guess it's like Barbie sez: Math Is Hard. :)

From:

clevernonsense.livejournal.com

My problem when playing Scrabble against new people is they usually don't like me much afterwards. ESPECIALLY if they are a liberal artsy type person who says they are great at Scrabble. Oh dear...

From:

Usually people who claim this have great vocabularies but no strategy. I've absolutely KILLED people with larger vocabularies than mine because I keep them away from the triple word-scores.

From:

closetalker11.livejournal.com

Exactly. Sometimes I want to be like, big words doesn't necessarily mean big points.

Have you read this book?

http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Competitive-ScrabblePlayers/dp/0142002267/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212523755&sr=8-1

Because I have. Yup.

From:

I haven't, but I plan to see "Word Wars" at some point.

From:

Not only is that one of my favorite books, but one of the Scrabble stars in it contacted me on OKCupid. How cool is that? :)

From:

shirt-seeker.livejournal.com

You are definitely not!

From:

closetalker11.livejournal.com

Heck yeah it would, it'd be a bingo! You could put the D on the double letter and it'd net you 78 points.

OK, that is amoung the nerdiest comments ever.

From:

I would have thought K would get you the higher value, though.

From:

closetalker11.livejournal.com

It does, but the double letter score is 5 spaces form teh middle space (that a letter of the first word must touch). So, the 2-points D is the best you can do there ... WAIT i just realized you could, indeed, put a K on the double letter. That changes the score to 85. YOU WIN!

From:

Ha-HA! Word nerdery!

From:

I will totally host one of these once the construction is done!

(Last winter, I hosted several Games & Drinks, in fact, though nobody actually got drunk.)

From:

We could do it in the park! It'd be great, you'd see a bunch of yuppies (I must sadly admit I am of that tribe, since I paid $17 for meatloaf recently) and hippies sitting in the park on blankets, drinking out of brown paper bags and playing the world's most awesome/nerdiest boardgame.

From: