Scrabble II highlights: BONELESS INHALANTS...
Donald Sauter
night, Wednesday, November 25, 2009, at the Dover Scrabble Club
(Delaware).
It was another outstanding session, by our own standards. (Even our
most miserable sessions make the best of tournament-style Scrabble
look sick.) We averaged 33.2 Points per turn as a group. You can see
below how many nines, eights and sevens we played. Several games were
thrillers right down to the wire. In one, the four players ranged
from 203 to 215 points on the last play; but the meager leftover tile
adjustment moved me from 4th place to 1st by a single point! In the
next 4-person game I was down by 63 points going into my last turn,
but managed to come up with INGRAINED, to go out with an empty bag and
win by 86! In another neck and neck game both Elsie and I were afraid
to play on the second row from the top for fear of opening up the
triple-word score for the other. After playing off a tile or two for
three turns in a row, I finally got my -TION word, DONATION, to go
down and out up there.
Tile oddities: One game had no J, Q, X, or Z, but 3J. One game had
121% of the expected no. of vowels, with 15A, 18E and 14O. Every game
is fresh and different!
Scrabble II is the purest Scrabble being played on earth. A few,
small, natural rule fixes keep players gunning for the longest words.
It rescues the game from the same, tired, old, connect-the-dot plays
of baby Scrabble words. Scrabble II does not allow for phony words.
In our club, we use a conventional dictionary, the American Heritage.
Scrabble II is more intelligent, challenging, and sophisticated than
modern American tournament-style Scrabble in every way. Heck, over 40%
of the oddball plays on championship boards wouldn't even be allowed
in our club. See:
http://www.geocities.com/donaldsauter/national-scrabble-championship-2009.htm
ALL I'M ASKING FOR . . . is any of the following:
1. Give it a try!
2. Give it a try and report back!
3. Too stuck in your ways to try it? Send me photos or screen shots
of a batch of your best tournament-style, baby-word Scrabble games and
I'll make you famous with a web page like the one above for the
National Scrabble Champions!
4. A quality Scrabble II program placed prominently on the internet.
I'll pay reasonable programming costs!
5. A dear, old benefactor to bankroll a Scrabble II tournament with
the largest ever cash prizes for a Scrabble tournament, which would
still amount to chicken feed!
Here's what we played last night in 5 games:
*** 9-letter Words ***
INGRAINED
INHALANTS
PITTANCES
*** 8-letter Words ***
BONELESS
CAUSEWAY
DONATION
ISOLATES
NATIONAL
*** 7-letter Words ***
ADJURED
ADOPTED
AUREOLA
BRIEFED
COWARDS
DAUNTED
DIPLOID
EATABLE
EQUATOR (Note: not QI)
EXPOSED
GROOVES
GUITARS
MUSHING
NEGATED
OBESITY
OUTLINE
RAVAGED
REBUKED
ROSIEST
TAINTED
TWELVES
WANDERS
WAVELET
WHITTLE
*** 6-letter Words ***
ABROAD
ACQUIT (Note: not QI)
AGHAST
AROUND
BAWLER
CRUMMY
FAMINE
FLINTS
INFIRM
JOGGED
KEYING
KOOKIE
MODULE
ROUTER
SAVAGE
STROVE
WILTED
*** 5-letter Words ***
ABOUT
ALIEN
ALIEN
AUDIO
BITCH
BRUIN
CUMIN
DECOR
DOWNS
DRINK
FOCUS
GASSY
HADJI
MAUVE
NIECE
NOISY
OGIVE
PAVES
STEAL
UNFIT
WHOLE
*** Selected 4-letter Words ***
CHAW
CHOW
DOCK
OVUM
QUAY (Note: not QI)
SWAG
WEEK
WICK
ZINC
*** Just these 3-letter Words ***
ADO AFT ANA AND AYE CAY EWE FAS FOG HEM HEY KIT NIX OHO POL TAU USE
VUM YAY ZEE
*** Just these 2-letter Words ***
AH AN AS BE DO ED EF EH EM EN ER EX GO ID IN IS IT LI LO ME OF OR OW
RE SO TA UP WE YO
You, too, can set your Scrabble board ablaze with REAL WORDS found in
a REAL DICTIONARY, and used by REAL PEOPLE:
http://www.geocities.com/donaldsauter/scrabble.htm
Donald Sauter