Me: “I can’t have caught the family autism gene; my language skills are too good.”
Older me: “so apparently hyperlexia is just another autism presentation…”
My brother recently told me that, if he turned out to be autistic, it’d probably be okay because he likes figuring out the rulesets of complicated systems.
At one stage the “French Scrabble” world champion came from New Zealand, spoke no French, but had memorised the dictionary.
This dude: Non-French Nigel
Looks like he also won the Spanish one.
At a high level, Scrabble isn’t about what words you know – it’s about strategy and board control, being able to take advantage of space to play while denying your opponent space.
“The Denying your Opponent Space” is the hardest part.
yeah you can’t have that many letters at once
Sure but that’s just because there is a maximum amount of word knowledge that can be accumulated and all of them have at least come close to fully memorizing the dictionary. That doesn’t mean they can skip all the time spent memorizing. People involved in tournament level Scrabble have practice routines that involve memorizing words.
You sound like you scrabble, so have you ever tried playing a round where you can only use combinations of letters that are NOT a word?
Do scrabblers do that?
I mean, I just “invented” it in my mind but immediately decided someone has SURELY done so before, it’s probably common.
And does it have a name?
If not, dibs on Elbbarcs!
I played a few games of reverse Scrabble where you try to get the lowest score…
You can swap letters every turn until your opponent gives up and quits.
Are you really playing the least serious scrabble to win at the cost of all fun though?
Sounds like it would be a lot easier, and even more of a ‘board control’ game.
And you’d be able to play your whole 7 letters in pretty much every turn (if you wanted to), since you’ll always be able to find some combination of your 7 letters that doesn’t form a real word. Or … at least almost always? I find it hard to imagine any combination of 7 letters that will always spell a real word no matter which order you put them in.
Yes it would be more about board control, and for instance finding arrangements that place high value letters on triple squares, without accidentally creating words. You’d need to know enough obscure words to avoid spelling any, and to catch your opponent out.
Athletics is just people who did the same movement over and over again until they got good at it. Totally skill free.
and the fewer vowels you have the fewer opportunities you have to draw more vowels. the consonant shift becomes the consonant trap.
The inability to leverage the board against a player with a larger vocabulary is a skill issue.
Skill in anything depends on your upbringing, free time, and innate desire to git gud.
I learned that from Slumdog Millionaire.
Just memorize all the two letter words.
You also gotta keep up with the Scrabble patchnotes and look out for new 2 letter words that are added to the dictionary.
The day “ok” was added was crazyyyI don’t know what the fuck xu means, but I’ve gotten 50+ points with it many times
The Greek alphabet has won me so many games.
Don’t forget the bluffing aspect
If you’re pushy enough, every word is valid
Just wait until they hear about moral luck
… because it’s true 😪Americans wondering how we got this message from the future.
