Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)
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The majority of the English-speaking competitors were mathematicians / scientists, rather than linguists for similar reasons.
This sometimes has amusing repercussions - the world no 2 at the time, who was Thai, played the word "hetairas" and then challenged the word "twigs"...
It was an amazing way to learn new vocabulary. If you haven't played, it's a 4x4 grid of words with 2 teams guessing which words belong to which team, giving additional words as clues.
After the board setup, the French players would explain the single, double, sometimes triple meanings of the words and I'd write them down into a notebook. Then, using a English-French dictionary I'd come up with clues that could fit. It worked surprisingly well, I think perhaps given the similarities between many English and French words. I wonder how it would work with a much more different language.
Despite that, your achievement is impressive. Nothing feels better than making a pun or beating a local in their own language!
The Chinese guy destroyed us. He nickel-and-dimed us with esoteric 2 letter words that we had never heard of and he strategically blocked us from the double and triple-word score squares.
On the way home from the party, my classmates and I were complaining about how the point of Scrabble was to show off your vocabulary and it was weird that we would lose to someone who could barely speak the language.
My girlfriend/now-wife interrupted our kvetching with, "You're all upset because someone else out-strategized you by understanding the rules better than you did. Get over yourselves."
She was correct.
But honestly, it isn't that exceptional a disconnect. Most board games have a "theme" that increases our enjoyment. But many of them are actually math games that could be played without thinking about the theme at all.
Chess is like that. Our knowledge of horses and bishops won't help us play chess. Same with Acquire. Hotel chains don't behave anything like contiguous tiles on a grid.
I'm about to order a copy of "Thunderbirds." The review I read said that it's quite enjoyable, but if you aren't a fan of the show, the theme actually gets in the way of enjoying the underlying game.
I feel like it may be more obvious when a Scrabble player wins a world championship despite not speaking the language, but the disconnect between a game as an abstract contest and a game's theme is very common.
My ex could never understand why I would play wacky strategies when we'd play board games. It's because I wasn't "playing the game" I was trying to "break the game" by better understanding the meta.
At high levels of strategy, you aren't even "playing the game" anymore.
But for some board games, the theme around the game aids our intuition about how to play the game. In others, it serves only as window-dressing.
Take, for example, Settlers of Catan. We could change the theme somewhat, but fundamentally a theme around resources helps players figure out what to do with the cards. Saying that "ore helps you build buildings" also helps new players understand and recall the rules.
It might be the exact same game if we got rid of the metaphor and just said it's a game where you can exchange three grey cards, two yellow cards, and an S token, for a C token, but that would make the game much harder to learn and play.
At high levels of play perhaps you might spend all your time thinking about card draw percentages and see the board as an abstract graph, but the theme won't get in your way.
I'd say similar things about Agricola. Or the 18xx series of games. Those themes really help most players learn and play the games.
Other games, not so much. Ticket to Ride would likely be just as easy to learn and play if it was an abstract game of network connections. Go and Chess are clearly long past their original themes. And so forth.
So getting back to your question, I'm trying to say something beyond "All games have an abstract game underneath the theme." I'm trying to say that "A large disconnect between a game's theme and its underlying abstract game is not rare." I don't claim it's universal, but I suggest it's not so rare that Scrabble stands alone as an oddity.
JM2C.
And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
>‘This isn’t the game as you have been told it is played’, said Keel. ‘If you play Scrabble this way, no-one else will ever want to play it with you. It’s exhausting to look at a board in terms of positional vulnerability. Nobody thinks you’re smart for exploiting the small, agile words in the Scrabble dictionary. They think you’re a dick. This is not fun. We get something different out of this. This is tactical. This is satisfying. Your letters aren’t parts of words. They’re weapons and you need to employ them when you can do the most damage.
This article [1] puts the number of distinct French root words (i.e., ignoring conjugation and other modifications) at around 65,000. This long-running online test [2] pegs the average English native speaker vocabulary size as maybe 25,000. So k might be at least N/3. That's not nothing!
Disclaimer: I know nothing about linguistics.
[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/international-scrab...
Also, memorizing all the different accented letters seems like it would be super difficult for an English speaker, but again not sure how French Scrabble treats accents.
> Nigel Richards of Christchurch, New Zealand, memorized French dictionary in nine weeks
It would appear that he speaks all the words of French. He may not speak the syntactically correct language but knowing all the words should take you a long way to winning this competition.
Reading the title I assumed he only used neologisms and other words common with foreign languages or something along those lines.
If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer words instead of that guy who knows that "qi" and "hext" are words in modern English dictionaries.
It seems like a different language would have more or less frequencies of any particular letter which should influence the amount of available tiles and what they are worth.
There are always a couple of letters with extremely high scores, and the winning tactic is to play ugly short words with those letters by the multipliers.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#/media/Plik:Polskie_s...
There’s a lot to pro scrabble (I know because I’ve played many of the best players in the world online), but knowing the small words is not what puts people over the top.
Now, if you’re just talking about casual games, then yeah, knowing the short X, Z, and Q words is going to give you a huge edge. But that has nothing to do with why a non French player won using the French dictionary.
What sucks is that this doesn't match expectations for a word game at all. If you're playing for light wordplay, or for competitive wordplay, your goals don't align with the game's scoring system at all. This can be OK if you're playing with another person with the same values as you, but it sucks to whatever degree there's a mismatch. This means it can still be great for at-home play but it can also be quite unexpectedly poor.
Success comes from astute tile-balancing and relentless pursuit of bingos. Which means that people already are using the strategy you want, and are getting compensated appropriately for it under the current rules.