9 ms·

An experiment in controlling how much of Scrabble is luck

72 points by dnetesn 8y ago

sethrin 8y ago
I'm glad someone did these experiments. I find that Scrabble begins to seem unfair after a certain level: there is certainly a great deal of strategy involved, but just as much of the game involves memorizing a fairly arbitrary collection of words: "za" is allowed, but "ok" is not, and there are far too many obscure transliterations of Arabic terms. The Scrabble Dictionary is more-or-less synonymous with the game itself, and the if the idea of memorizing a particular dictionary is already of dubious entertainment value, this is not improved by using a bad dictionary. Scrabble is a classic game. The basic idea seems great. I just wish you could have a Scrabble game without having to say, "Seriously, that is considered a word? This game is ridiculous!" and feeling like the other person has an unfair advantage.
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  If you're playing the board game, you can agree to use your own dictionary.
  - sethrin 8y ago
    The problem is that the allowed two- and three-letter words matter the most, and using a game-specific dictionary at least provides an authoritative list, if not a good one. The omission of "ok" from the official dictionary is likely deliberate, and there is at least some etymological reasoning behind that. The inclusion of "za" is more nonsensical, but as a two-letter word which uses "z", it's extremely common in gameplay, and could be argued as being important enough to merit inclusion simply to make the game easier. I'm not sure that there is any good solution to this. I think that high-level Scrabble might simply fail to be a very good game.
    - jen729w 8y ago
      My girlfriend loves Scrabble but hates the list of nonsensical but allowed two letter words, so in our version they aren’t allowed. An exception is made for “qi”, just because. Mine is not to question why, simply to regularly lose.
      - culot 8y ago
        Qi is too sweet to relinquish.
      - zwily 8y ago
        QAT has saved my bacon so many times.
    - cdelsolar 8y ago
      As a tournament Scrabble player, high-level Scrabble is actually an extremely good game, one of the best ever made. There is a huge amount of depth to it. I can expound upon it some more, but don't know how interested people would be. I am currently in Boston for a tournament - the Can-Am (Canada vs USA championship).
      - ejstronge 8y ago
        Ah, is this open to the public? Where is it being held?
        cdelsolar 8y ago
        In Cambridge, MA at a community center. It is not quite open to the public. You have to be a member of the North American Scrabble Players Association (www.scrabbleplayers.org - $30/year) and have amassed a high enough ELO to qualify for this tournament. There are many tournaments held all over the country that are open to any NASPA members though. I'm excited for it! I represented the US in 2013 in Vancouver and we won that one.
      - baddox 8y ago
        I don’t doubt that high level Scrabble is intriguing, but I think the problem (if you even want to call it a problem) is that it’s effectively a completely different game than the casual game of Scrabble. Casual Scrabble is all about coming up with fairly well-known words. Serious Scrabble, I presume, is about controlling board position armed with a vast knowledge of legal words. As soon as someone in a casual game plays a questionable esoteric word that, if challenged, turns out to be a legal word, the casual game becomes a lot less fun for everyone involved.
        cdelsolar 8y ago
        Your presumption about serious Scrabble is actually very accurate. The actual words themselves don’t even matter that much. I practice anagramming during a lot of my free time, to the point where seeing letters like EOHISTRE immediately (within less than half a second) brings up theories, theorise, isothere in my head. The game is largely about controlling the board, rough probability calculations, inferencing of your opponent’s tiles from their previous moves, etc etc. There’s a lot to it. It hasn’t even been seriously solved by a computer (the best AI does not beat the best player more than 50% of the time).
    - baddox 8y ago
      I agree. I think that Scrabble is a great game which, by its very design, cannot be an interesting game at serious competitive levels. It’s great fun to play with a group of friends who will accept words on an unspoken honor system. But as soon as there is serious competition with meaningful stakes, it reduces almost entirely to the arbitrary choice of word lists. The same is true for a lot of great party games. Scattergories is a great example. As soon as it becomes seriously competitive, the key rule (that everyone votes whether to allow each submission) effectively ruins the fun.
      - cdelsolar 8y ago
        It is not true at all that it’s not an interesting game at the higher levels. There’s so much more to scrabble than just whether a word is good or not.
      - dmurray 8y ago
        No, it's interesting at the low level (play with the words you know) and interesting at the "serious" level (memorize a substantial portion of the 250,000 words). You can tell the latter because there are plenty of serious Scrabble tournaments. It breaks down somewhere in the middle, where you play with your group of friends but want to be competitive, and it turns out someone gains a huge advantage by learning all the 2- and 3- letter words, all the "Q without U" words, or whatever. One imperfect way to address this is to print out the 2- and 3- letter words and make them available to everyone.
    - mistrial9 8y ago
      a list of allowed two-letter words on a piece of paper, with the game, and updated from time to time by agreements, solves this well ! local example - 'IQ' is not allowed, but 'Qi' is on the list..
- rhcom2 8y ago
  I've played where each player gets a sheet of all 2 letter words to balance this feeling.
- kyleblarson 8y ago
  The high level players will memorize all 3 letter words and sometimes 4 letter words as well. Their scrabble-dictionary vocabularies are incredible. Here's an old article about the highest score ever (at the time). It included a triple triple worth 365 points alone for QUIXOTRY. https://slate.com/technology/2006/10/830-how-a-carpenter-got-the-highest-scrabble-score-ever.html https://slate.com/technology/2006/10/830-how-a-carpenter-got...
  - sethrin 8y ago
    What odds would you give that that word has been used more than five times in the history of English literature?
    - gwern 8y ago
      Turns out to be both more common and mean something a little different than I thought: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=quixotry&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cquixotry%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=quixotry&year_... https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=quixotry https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=quixotry
    - notahacker 8y ago
      Google Books returns over 8000 results, and some of them aren't even dictionaries!
      - sethrin 8y ago
        The corpus I searched returned no results, but I'll take the correction: mea culpa.
    - krackers 8y ago
      Quixotic which I think that's derived from isn't that obscure.
  - cdelsolar 8y ago
    the high level players will memorize all words until 9 letters, and some even know those and beyond. I know all the 2-8 (approximately 80K words) pretty well, although not as well as I'd like.
- T-hawk 8y ago
  Scrabble isn't a word game. It's an area-control game with 150,000 rules to define legal placement for your resources. Some of those rules have mnemonics in the form of words you know.
  - zzo38computer 8y ago
    Unlike a game such as Go, in Scrabble once you place your pieces they are no longer only yours and can now be used by both players to add on more pieces next to them (although you do get payment for placing them at first, especially at positions with multipliers, since then your opponent can't use those multipliers). However, if you do not use all of your cards in one turn, you will keep some and can plan ahead a bit, for use later.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > Unlike a game such as Go, in Scrabble once you place your pieces they are no longer only yours and can now be used by both players to add on more pieces next to them Yes, this is an important aspect of area control in Scrabble. Scrabble is about not letting other players play on high-scoring spaces. It's not enough to take them when you can; you have to avoid playing near those tiles so that your opponents won't be able to play on them.
  - braythwayt 8y ago
    As many have commented, there are two Scrabbles. Below a certain level, it is a fun “beer and pretzels” game, where having a good vocabulary helps, and when someone plays an unusual word, the other players “ooh” and”aah.” Abive a certain level, it is a strategy game requiring a large memorized list of allowable combinations of tiles to play, and the correspondance to actual words has no more significance than the shape of a rook in chess resembling a tower. The gap between the two games is tremendous, and this is, in my opinion, the game’s only fault. It’s very intimidating to enjoy the beer and pretzels game, but discover that in order to play seriously, it’s not just 10,000 hours of study, but much of that will be rote memorization. But nevrtheless, the beer and pretzels version of the game is also a valid pursuit. It’s just not the Scrabble you choose to play.
- baddox 8y ago
  Apparently “ok” was recently added. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/score-scrabble-dictionary-adds-ok-ew-to-official-play https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/score-scr...
  - cdelsolar 8y ago
    yes, OK will become tournament valid in February of next year.
- RyanCavanaugh 8y ago
  Any list of words will have both inclusions and exclusions that someone finds objectionable. The exclusion of "OK" is hardly arbitrary; it isn't allowed because it isn't pronounced "ock". Compare RADAR / LASER / SCUBA / LIDAR vs CD / SMS / PC / BM
  - Retric 8y ago
    Ok is being added. https://www.cnet.com/news/its-finally-ok-to-play-ok-as-a-scrabble-word/ https://www.cnet.com/news/its-finally-ok-to-play-ok-as-a-scr... So, it's very arbitrary.
labster 8y ago
In my opinion, all of the best games have some portion of luck in them, but a larger portion of skill. Catan is boring to me because dice rolls determine too much of the game; chess is boring to me because I know I'm always going to lose unless I feel like investing hundreds of hours into learning the game. Scrabble is one of the few pre-Euros that manages to get the luck to skill balance right. The skill of having a larger vocabulary is actually useful IRL, so that helps a bit. There's another part of it that's the game itself, like knowing all of the two-letter words, which isn't quite as useful.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  In case anyone else didn't understand "pre-Euros" in this context: it refers to the abstract, strategy-oriented styles of table game that first became popular in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame
- scythe 8y ago
  This is why my backgammon and cribbage are my favorites of the classic parlor games. Scrabble is fun until you get to a high level, at which point it gets degenerate wrt memorizing words.
- travisjungroth 8y ago
  There’s also an interesting relationship between luck and time. If games are short, you can play more of them and luck will matter less over time. Anyone can win one poker hand, but it takes some skill to win a tournament.
- thomasahle 8y ago
  > chess is boring to me because I know I'm always going to lose unless I feel like investing hundreds of hours into learning the game. If you play against well calibrated opponents, like you'd do in any club or in online chess, you're going to win/lose 50/50 (not counting draws). That's independent of how many hours you put into the game. All that's going to change with more practice is a richer understanding of what's going on on the board.
aidenn0 8y ago
Can confirm bingos are luck. My only win against my mom in scrabble was a 1st turn bingo that she challenged and lost (EJECTOR, she was less than 50% sure that the "or" was wrong, but didn't want to concede a 1st turn bingo that was questionable).
- cdelsolar 8y ago
  you make your own luck. I average around 2 bingos per game.
  - autokad 8y ago
    clearly the data suggests that its bingos that make up most of the luck in the game.
- RyanCavanaugh 8y ago
  Since a decent chunk of the observed skill of Scrabble experts comes from points from getting bingos more frequently, it seems you've discovered that Luck is an intrinsic statistic of humans. Interesting!
- OscarCunningham 8y ago
  The penalty for an incorrect challenge is losing a turn isn't it? So it might be worthwhile to challenge if you were only 40% sure if you thought you couldn't get 20 points on your turn.
hammock 8y ago
In my family, we play a variation that makes the game much more skillful. I'm not sure how common it is. But my grandmother's claim to fame is that she played in college with the inventor of Scrabble, before it was commercialized (the rules were different). These are the variations we play: 1) a dictionary can be used whenever you want, to look up a specific word in mind only (you cannot leaf through it for ideas) 2) When it is your turn, before playing your letters, you may swap a letter in your hand, for a letter on the board. This can be done as much as you like, but only one letter at a time, and each letter must make a new, valid word. No points are scored when swapping. The result is that turns can take 10 minutes or more, but bingos are very common and individual scores get into 5-600 points often. There is much more skill and very little luck- as you are not limited by the letters you draw- rather, you can use just about any letter that's on the board, if you can get it! Likewise, if you draw the X you are not "lucky" because the X will likely get used again and again over the course of the game by multiple players. I'm not sure how common this variation is, but I like it, and it's well-suited for serious players.
- irishcoffee 8y ago
  Do you happen to remember how the rules were different? I'm very curious. I also want to try your variation of the rules, swapping letters already on the board adds a whole new dimension, very intriguing.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  The letter swapping sounds fun!
- kaikai 8y ago
  With the swapping, this sounds more similar to Bananagrams! I also like that it places less emphasis on memorizing words that are helpful in scrabble but not real life.
- culot 8y ago
  My family's modified rule was the ability to play off of used multiplier tiles, leading to fun with super high scores. Always a thrill to have a word take up one entire edge of the board while reaping the extra multiplier(s).
njarboe 8y ago
If you are playing a game with people of various skill levels it is a good thing to have a decent amount of luck involved or one person will win all the time (unless they lose on purpose). That is not enjoyable, especially for the losers. In tournament play, where you are ranked and play against similarly skilled opponents, it makes sense that upping the skill factor can increase fun, but for casual home play, not so much. My family has quite a bit of variance in skill levels in scrabble and we have different rules depending on who is playing. When the skill levels are very mixed, we allow one word lookup for free and then the next word must be in the dictionary to play (ie. no need to challenge and possibly lose your turn). We also have a list of two letter words you can consult. This works pretty well and when only the hard core players are playing we go back to the official rules.
IngoBlechschmid 8y ago
(Off topic) In case anyone is intrigued by the post /How to Build a Probability Microscope/ linked from the article, I created a JavaScript/Python-based simulation: The linked article: http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/-how-to-build-a-probability-microscope http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/-how-to-build-a-probability-m... The simulation: https://www.speicherleck.de/iblech/zufall-im-browser/index.en.html https://www.speicherleck.de/iblech/zufall-im-browser/index.e... (select the bottommost example)
laurentl 8y ago
Surprised that no one mentioned Duplicate Scrabble, which is the most common tournament form in France. Ar each round, everyone gets the same draw and submits their best word. The overall best word is kept and added to the board. This completely eliminates the luck factor, as everyone gets the same draw at each round. Missing an “easy” bingo in one round is a surefire way to lose. Obviously this means that to play at a competitive level, you need to memorize all possible words up to 9 letters or so. Fun fact: the current top player of French scrabble is from New Zealand and doesn’t speak a word of French. He just memorized all ~200k valid words in the OSD. Needless to say, this version is vastly less fun to play casually.
- dfan 8y ago
  If I understand your description of the rules correctly, it sounds like that removes any sort of strategy from the game (manipulating the board and the rack), making it a sequence of Scrabble puzzles instead with no between-player interaction. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, but I think it would remove a lot of the interest for many people (me included). I have read about Nigel Richards, the New Zealander French Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French, and I think that the game he is the champion of is "regular" Scrabble (with French vocabulary). For example the Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-french-scrabble-champion-nigel-richards-doesnt-speak-french https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-fre... talks about his "pretty rotten draw of letters". Edited: Ah, I see from his Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_player) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe...) that he has won both Classique and Duplicate titles.
  - laurentl 8y ago
    Your understanding of the Duplicate rules is correct. It removes any element of chance (all players are judged on how well they manage a given draw) but it also removes any element of strategy. As an aside, it also makes it a lot easier to organize large scale tournaments - you can organize a Duplicate game with any number of players. I find it a lot less fun to play, but I know serious players who don’t understand why you would play Classic scrabble.

72 points by dnetesn 8y ago

I'm glad someone did these experiments. I find that Scrabble begins to seem unfair after a certain level: there is certainly a great deal of strategy involved, but just as much of the game involves memorizing a fairly arbitrary collection of words: "za" is allowed, but "ok" is not, and there are far too many obscure transliterations of Arabic terms. The Scrabble Dictionary is more-or-less synonymous with the game itself, and the if the idea of memorizing a particular dictionary is already of dubious entertainment value, this is not improved by using a bad dictionary. Scrabble is a classic game. The basic idea seems great. I just wish you could have a Scrabble game without having to say, "Seriously, that is considered a word? This game is ridiculous!" and feeling like the other person has an unfair advantage.

ChrisSD 8y ago
If you're playing the board game, you can agree to use your own dictionary.
- sethrin 8y ago
  The problem is that the allowed two- and three-letter words matter the most, and using a game-specific dictionary at least provides an authoritative list, if not a good one. The omission of "ok" from the official dictionary is likely deliberate, and there is at least some etymological reasoning behind that. The inclusion of "za" is more nonsensical, but as a two-letter word which uses "z", it's extremely common in gameplay, and could be argued as being important enough to merit inclusion simply to make the game easier. I'm not sure that there is any good solution to this. I think that high-level Scrabble might simply fail to be a very good game.
  - jen729w 8y ago
    My girlfriend loves Scrabble but hates the list of nonsensical but allowed two letter words, so in our version they aren’t allowed. An exception is made for “qi”, just because. Mine is not to question why, simply to regularly lose.
    - culot 8y ago
      Qi is too sweet to relinquish.
    - zwily 8y ago
      QAT has saved my bacon so many times.
  - cdelsolar 8y ago
    As a tournament Scrabble player, high-level Scrabble is actually an extremely good game, one of the best ever made. There is a huge amount of depth to it. I can expound upon it some more, but don't know how interested people would be. I am currently in Boston for a tournament - the Can-Am (Canada vs USA championship).
    - ejstronge 8y ago
      Ah, is this open to the public? Where is it being held?
      - cdelsolar 8y ago
        In Cambridge, MA at a community center. It is not quite open to the public. You have to be a member of the North American Scrabble Players Association (www.scrabbleplayers.org - $30/year) and have amassed a high enough ELO to qualify for this tournament. There are many tournaments held all over the country that are open to any NASPA members though. I'm excited for it! I represented the US in 2013 in Vancouver and we won that one.
    - baddox 8y ago
      I don’t doubt that high level Scrabble is intriguing, but I think the problem (if you even want to call it a problem) is that it’s effectively a completely different game than the casual game of Scrabble. Casual Scrabble is all about coming up with fairly well-known words. Serious Scrabble, I presume, is about controlling board position armed with a vast knowledge of legal words. As soon as someone in a casual game plays a questionable esoteric word that, if challenged, turns out to be a legal word, the casual game becomes a lot less fun for everyone involved.
      - cdelsolar 8y ago
        Your presumption about serious Scrabble is actually very accurate. The actual words themselves don’t even matter that much. I practice anagramming during a lot of my free time, to the point where seeing letters like EOHISTRE immediately (within less than half a second) brings up theories, theorise, isothere in my head. The game is largely about controlling the board, rough probability calculations, inferencing of your opponent’s tiles from their previous moves, etc etc. There’s a lot to it. It hasn’t even been seriously solved by a computer (the best AI does not beat the best player more than 50% of the time).
  - baddox 8y ago
    I agree. I think that Scrabble is a great game which, by its very design, cannot be an interesting game at serious competitive levels. It’s great fun to play with a group of friends who will accept words on an unspoken honor system. But as soon as there is serious competition with meaningful stakes, it reduces almost entirely to the arbitrary choice of word lists. The same is true for a lot of great party games. Scattergories is a great example. As soon as it becomes seriously competitive, the key rule (that everyone votes whether to allow each submission) effectively ruins the fun.
    - cdelsolar 8y ago
      It is not true at all that it’s not an interesting game at the higher levels. There’s so much more to scrabble than just whether a word is good or not.
    - dmurray 8y ago
      No, it's interesting at the low level (play with the words you know) and interesting at the "serious" level (memorize a substantial portion of the 250,000 words). You can tell the latter because there are plenty of serious Scrabble tournaments. It breaks down somewhere in the middle, where you play with your group of friends but want to be competitive, and it turns out someone gains a huge advantage by learning all the 2- and 3- letter words, all the "Q without U" words, or whatever. One imperfect way to address this is to print out the 2- and 3- letter words and make them available to everyone.
  - mistrial9 8y ago
    a list of allowed two-letter words on a piece of paper, with the game, and updated from time to time by agreements, solves this well ! local example - 'IQ' is not allowed, but 'Qi' is on the list..
rhcom2 8y ago
I've played where each player gets a sheet of all 2 letter words to balance this feeling.
kyleblarson 8y ago
The high level players will memorize all 3 letter words and sometimes 4 letter words as well. Their scrabble-dictionary vocabularies are incredible. Here's an old article about the highest score ever (at the time). It included a triple triple worth 365 points alone for QUIXOTRY. https://slate.com/technology/2006/10/830-how-a-carpenter-got-the-highest-scrabble-score-ever.html https://slate.com/technology/2006/10/830-how-a-carpenter-got...
- sethrin 8y ago
  What odds would you give that that word has been used more than five times in the history of English literature?
  - gwern 8y ago
    Turns out to be both more common and mean something a little different than I thought: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=quixotry&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cquixotry%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=quixotry&year_... https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=quixotry https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=quixotry
  - notahacker 8y ago
    Google Books returns over 8000 results, and some of them aren't even dictionaries!
    - sethrin 8y ago
      The corpus I searched returned no results, but I'll take the correction: mea culpa.
  - krackers 8y ago
    Quixotic which I think that's derived from isn't that obscure.
- cdelsolar 8y ago
  the high level players will memorize all words until 9 letters, and some even know those and beyond. I know all the 2-8 (approximately 80K words) pretty well, although not as well as I'd like.
T-hawk 8y ago
Scrabble isn't a word game. It's an area-control game with 150,000 rules to define legal placement for your resources. Some of those rules have mnemonics in the form of words you know.
- zzo38computer 8y ago
  Unlike a game such as Go, in Scrabble once you place your pieces they are no longer only yours and can now be used by both players to add on more pieces next to them (although you do get payment for placing them at first, especially at positions with multipliers, since then your opponent can't use those multipliers). However, if you do not use all of your cards in one turn, you will keep some and can plan ahead a bit, for use later.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > Unlike a game such as Go, in Scrabble once you place your pieces they are no longer only yours and can now be used by both players to add on more pieces next to them Yes, this is an important aspect of area control in Scrabble. Scrabble is about not letting other players play on high-scoring spaces. It's not enough to take them when you can; you have to avoid playing near those tiles so that your opponents won't be able to play on them.
- braythwayt 8y ago
  As many have commented, there are two Scrabbles. Below a certain level, it is a fun “beer and pretzels” game, where having a good vocabulary helps, and when someone plays an unusual word, the other players “ooh” and”aah.” Abive a certain level, it is a strategy game requiring a large memorized list of allowable combinations of tiles to play, and the correspondance to actual words has no more significance than the shape of a rook in chess resembling a tower. The gap between the two games is tremendous, and this is, in my opinion, the game’s only fault. It’s very intimidating to enjoy the beer and pretzels game, but discover that in order to play seriously, it’s not just 10,000 hours of study, but much of that will be rote memorization. But nevrtheless, the beer and pretzels version of the game is also a valid pursuit. It’s just not the Scrabble you choose to play.
baddox 8y ago
Apparently “ok” was recently added. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/score-scrabble-dictionary-adds-ok-ew-to-official-play https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/score-scr...
- cdelsolar 8y ago
  yes, OK will become tournament valid in February of next year.
RyanCavanaugh 8y ago
Any list of words will have both inclusions and exclusions that someone finds objectionable. The exclusion of "OK" is hardly arbitrary; it isn't allowed because it isn't pronounced "ock". Compare RADAR / LASER / SCUBA / LIDAR vs CD / SMS / PC / BM
- Retric 8y ago
  Ok is being added. https://www.cnet.com/news/its-finally-ok-to-play-ok-as-a-scrabble-word/ https://www.cnet.com/news/its-finally-ok-to-play-ok-as-a-scr... So, it's very arbitrary.

labster 8y ago

In my opinion, all of the best games have some portion of luck in them, but a larger portion of skill. Catan is boring to me because dice rolls determine too much of the game; chess is boring to me because I know I'm always going to lose unless I feel like investing hundreds of hours into learning the game. Scrabble is one of the few pre-Euros that manages to get the luck to skill balance right. The skill of having a larger vocabulary is actually useful IRL, so that helps a bit. There's another part of it that's the game itself, like knowing all of the two-letter words, which isn't quite as useful.

tomjakubowski 8y ago
In case anyone else didn't understand "pre-Euros" in this context: it refers to the abstract, strategy-oriented styles of table game that first became popular in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame
scythe 8y ago
This is why my backgammon and cribbage are my favorites of the classic parlor games. Scrabble is fun until you get to a high level, at which point it gets degenerate wrt memorizing words.
travisjungroth 8y ago
There’s also an interesting relationship between luck and time. If games are short, you can play more of them and luck will matter less over time. Anyone can win one poker hand, but it takes some skill to win a tournament.
thomasahle 8y ago
> chess is boring to me because I know I'm always going to lose unless I feel like investing hundreds of hours into learning the game. If you play against well calibrated opponents, like you'd do in any club or in online chess, you're going to win/lose 50/50 (not counting draws). That's independent of how many hours you put into the game. All that's going to change with more practice is a richer understanding of what's going on on the board.

aidenn0 8y ago

Can confirm bingos are luck. My only win against my mom in scrabble was a 1st turn bingo that she challenged and lost (EJECTOR, she was less than 50% sure that the "or" was wrong, but didn't want to concede a 1st turn bingo that was questionable).

cdelsolar 8y ago
you make your own luck. I average around 2 bingos per game.
- autokad 8y ago
  clearly the data suggests that its bingos that make up most of the luck in the game.
RyanCavanaugh 8y ago
Since a decent chunk of the observed skill of Scrabble experts comes from points from getting bingos more frequently, it seems you've discovered that Luck is an intrinsic statistic of humans. Interesting!
OscarCunningham 8y ago
The penalty for an incorrect challenge is losing a turn isn't it? So it might be worthwhile to challenge if you were only 40% sure if you thought you couldn't get 20 points on your turn.

hammock 8y ago

In my family, we play a variation that makes the game much more skillful. I'm not sure how common it is. But my grandmother's claim to fame is that she played in college with the inventor of Scrabble, before it was commercialized (the rules were different). These are the variations we play: 1) a dictionary can be used whenever you want, to look up a specific word in mind only (you cannot leaf through it for ideas) 2) When it is your turn, before playing your letters, you may swap a letter in your hand, for a letter on the board. This can be done as much as you like, but only one letter at a time, and each letter must make a new, valid word. No points are scored when swapping. The result is that turns can take 10 minutes or more, but bingos are very common and individual scores get into 5-600 points often. There is much more skill and very little luck- as you are not limited by the letters you draw- rather, you can use just about any letter that's on the board, if you can get it! Likewise, if you draw the X you are not "lucky" because the X will likely get used again and again over the course of the game by multiple players. I'm not sure how common this variation is, but I like it, and it's well-suited for serious players.

irishcoffee 8y ago
Do you happen to remember how the rules were different? I'm very curious. I also want to try your variation of the rules, swapping letters already on the board adds a whole new dimension, very intriguing.
BurningFrog 8y ago
The letter swapping sounds fun!
kaikai 8y ago
With the swapping, this sounds more similar to Bananagrams! I also like that it places less emphasis on memorizing words that are helpful in scrabble but not real life.
culot 8y ago
My family's modified rule was the ability to play off of used multiplier tiles, leading to fun with super high scores. Always a thrill to have a word take up one entire edge of the board while reaping the extra multiplier(s).

njarboe 8y ago

If you are playing a game with people of various skill levels it is a good thing to have a decent amount of luck involved or one person will win all the time (unless they lose on purpose). That is not enjoyable, especially for the losers. In tournament play, where you are ranked and play against similarly skilled opponents, it makes sense that upping the skill factor can increase fun, but for casual home play, not so much. My family has quite a bit of variance in skill levels in scrabble and we have different rules depending on who is playing. When the skill levels are very mixed, we allow one word lookup for free and then the next word must be in the dictionary to play (ie. no need to challenge and possibly lose your turn). We also have a list of two letter words you can consult. This works pretty well and when only the hard core players are playing we go back to the official rules.

IngoBlechschmid 8y ago

(Off topic) In case anyone is intrigued by the post /How to Build a Probability Microscope/ linked from the article, I created a JavaScript/Python-based simulation: The linked article: http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/-how-to-build-a-probability-microscope http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/-how-to-build-a-probability-m... The simulation: https://www.speicherleck.de/iblech/zufall-im-browser/index.en.html https://www.speicherleck.de/iblech/zufall-im-browser/index.e... (select the bottommost example)

laurentl 8y ago

Surprised that no one mentioned Duplicate Scrabble, which is the most common tournament form in France. Ar each round, everyone gets the same draw and submits their best word. The overall best word is kept and added to the board. This completely eliminates the luck factor, as everyone gets the same draw at each round. Missing an “easy” bingo in one round is a surefire way to lose. Obviously this means that to play at a competitive level, you need to memorize all possible words up to 9 letters or so. Fun fact: the current top player of French scrabble is from New Zealand and doesn’t speak a word of French. He just memorized all ~200k valid words in the OSD. Needless to say, this version is vastly less fun to play casually.

dfan 8y ago
If I understand your description of the rules correctly, it sounds like that removes any sort of strategy from the game (manipulating the board and the rack), making it a sequence of Scrabble puzzles instead with no between-player interaction. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, but I think it would remove a lot of the interest for many people (me included). I have read about Nigel Richards, the New Zealander French Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French, and I think that the game he is the champion of is "regular" Scrabble (with French vocabulary). For example the Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-french-scrabble-champion-nigel-richards-doesnt-speak-french https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-fre... talks about his "pretty rotten draw of letters". Edited: Ah, I see from his Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_player) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe...) that he has won both Classique and Duplicate titles.
- laurentl 8y ago
  Your understanding of the Duplicate rules is correct. It removes any element of chance (all players are judged on how well they manage a given draw) but it also removes any element of strategy. As an aside, it also makes it a lot easier to organize large scale tournaments - you can organize a Duplicate game with any number of players. I find it a lot less fun to play, but I know serious players who don’t understand why you would play Classic scrabble.