On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast
lithub.com
lithub.com
Then the game comes down to managing your rack and your opponent's. Here's are some common techniques/strats:
- Q-pinning: blocking bonus squares or hooks by using difficult letters so your opponent can't lay down a high scoring turn.
- Q-burning: the inverse, taking a hit on current turn score just to get rid of difficult letters.
- E-burning: sometimes having all-low score letters in your rack is worse than having Q-letters as this will hamper your ability to get high scores on good board positions. A well-balanced rank is key to winning.
- Q-swapping: late-game strategy, maintain a difficult letter in your rack to swap in one of the last turns so your opponent draws the impossible letters forcibly. Remember unused rack letters will be deducted from final score. This dirty trick has won me many close games.
I think the best programs run Monte Carlo simulations on the contents of their opponent’s rack. That includes modeling their opponent’s moves, and thus improves on just computing these probabilities.
As a simple example, if they played a move, but, if they had an ‘e’, could have made a much better move, chances are they didn’t have an ‘e’ when they made their last move, even if that, a priori, was still highly likely.
It's a project I hope to go back to someday, and maybe follow up on some of the human-like play options and variants I came up with along the way. The tournament word list is proprietary and at the time there were apparently no reasonable licensing options (licensing has since improved), which put a damper on releasing my engine.
Fast forward 20 years and now I have a Scrabble Solver app (open source) in my portfolio that I'm proud of. It still needs improvements to run nicely on mobile but I'm happy with how it runs on desktop.
Maybe someone will find it useful, so I'm sharing here :)
A recommendation for the solver part, it seems your using a word trie instead of the more common directed acyclic word graph (DAWG) or the much faster GADDAG. GADDAGs are really cool, +2x faster lookup than DAWGs at 5x space for common Scrabble dictionaries? Even today's CPU cache sizes fit an English GADDAG with ease. [1]
I am working on a project for reinforcement learning for Scrabble, hoping to learn advanced strategies. When I need a front-end, I will definitely reference your project.
This is awesome, I'm surely going to try this. Thank you.
> I am working on a project for reinforcement learning for Scrabble, hoping to learn advanced strategies.
Is your project shared somewhere? I enjoy anything Scrabble-related.
> That's a really nice front-end! Really good code structure and dev practices too to my JS-nooby eye at least.
> When I need a front-end, I will definitely reference your project.
Happy to hear!
The problem was that Scrabble dictionary is too inclusive, and the Scrabble game rewards making multiple words. So, instead of learning fun and obscure words, it’s more important to spot how to make viable grids that gives you five words with one move, while involving some high-scored letters. Hence, tons of cheesy 2-or-3-letter words, “qi” as mentioned in the article, “mm”, “hm”, currency units, etc.
Once in a blue moon, there comes a moment of absolute brilliancy when you piece together a long word that pokes into the corner, earning a devastating 80+ points. That feels glorious.
But most of the game I played, it’s mainly short scuffles that dominates the mid and late game.
I wish that Scrabble would reward long words more, and get rid of the cheesy words. No more units, or non-sensical onomatopoeia.
> There is something magical, however, about realizing how to play Scrabble even one step above beginner: using the bonus spaces, creating overlapping words, hitting your first bingo. You also learn how to play defense.
> The first time you realize that your opponent is stuck with the Q and you make a crucial play to deny her the legal two- word layup QI, securing yourself the victory, well— that’s magic.
almost sounds like a fun game about territory control or something, but I’m not about to memorize a bunch of random letter combinations to play it.
Since you already know most of them you're only memorizing a few dozen very short words.
Then a few vowel dumps wouldn't hurt, short V/X/K words...
I've been playing like that with my parents (in their 80s) and it makes for a much more fun game!
I've heard it expressed like this a couple of times now, but the earliest citation I can find with a quick Google is...here [0] on HN in 2018.
One reason Wordle is awesome is because they manually filtered down the possible 5 letter words.
Eg: I'm Australian and instantly thought "that'd be a paring knife ..", and yes, that appears to be what it is.
Someone who reads is a reader, viewer, writer, dancer, God loves a tryer, and someone who pares should be a parer.
Although I often try that pattern and have it denied, if you can shelve a project it suggests shelver which is in, if you can table a motion it suggests tabler which isn’t.
Of all the 'weird' two letter words mentioned, I'd consider qi probably the most reasonable and common, and certainly one that I actually hear used
A brand name, yes, but from an actual word.
[0] Anybody else here remember being both very excited about, and then very disappointed by, the Adam?
so any borrowed word from a non-Latin alphabet is a romanization, that's not a sane criterion (κριτήριον)
My experience having briefly gotten into competitive scrabble 15 years ago is that memorizing the short words is the price of admission for a more fun game. Knowing the short words makes it possible to fit the long words on the board.
instead of "za" I would suggest "ze" as a pronoun for a non-binary person
As suggested elsewhere, we play with a two letter cheat sheet to make the game more fun for those that don't know all those words.
Thinking about whether something is a likely answer also introduces some strategy itself.
In spite of being something of a professional writer, I don't usually like word games (including Scrabble) much. But I do like Wordle--although I quickly tired of the multiple word variants.
But the important thing was to state the meaning before looking up the word, not just using the reference list to pick out combinations that work with your letters. It being a real word did not count if you didn't understand the word.
This wouldn't work as well for online gaming, I expect. And of course you can game it by memorising the meanings of some obscure words, but that (expanded vocab) was part of the point.
It's a very different game to "family" Scrabble, but we always had the etiquette rule that you should know the definition of a word you played. It isn't enough to know it's in the Scrabble dictionary.
There’s virtually no strategy, but tactics is of paramount importance. Things like keeping your rack balanced; which one of several similarly-scoring words to play, based on your knowledge of the game state; when and what to exchange, etc. These factors are all at play very much intuitively, and are learnt with practice over the years.
Polish is especially fun to play because it’s highly inflected, meaning that:
- the number of unique words in the dictionary is about one order of magnitude greater than in, say, English or French – it’d be much harder for Nigel Richards to learn them all;
- keeping an eye on certain combinations of letters (that might form an inflective ending) is much more important.
Plus, there’s a small but vibrant community, with its very own history and folklore to be proud of. :)
[0] I don't know how much better - but Maven was considered better than the best humans in 2002, and in most such pursuits, machines have improved faster than humans since then https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437020...
The way we played Quake was by taking hundreds of user made maps and playing them one by one untill they got stale.
It's completely different way of playing than what modern games do. Basically learning just a handful of maps by heart up to specific timings, sound and few pixel spots.
Basically rigidifying naturally variable parts of the game to make it more boring and repetitive for the sake of creating controlled conditions of competition.
Enough was enough. I installed a Scrabble game on my phone. Played every day and took the crown at our next Christmas Scrabble game. The win thoroughly surprised everyone.
That year I had read Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset. Which the Scrabble win nicely illustrated.
Same goes for memorizing useful-in-Scrabble words that occur on Scrabble boards 100x more than they do anywhere else.
I saw a fun documentary on competitive Scrabble tournaments and I've always wondered if tournaments have considered using computers to randomize the tile draw but constrained to equalize the "luck" between players in a game. I know that competitive Rubik's cube tournaments use a computer to generate a starting cube pattern that's not purely random in that it eliminates easy solves.
I guess the simplest form would be ensuring each player in a game draws an equal distribution of letter-points in a game but I'm sure there are more complex ways to be random but weighted to ensure equal opportunity in a match. What I don't know is if reducing the variability of draws would even be considered an improvement at competitive levels.
For instance, which is more fair, letters balanced by pointsbanf partitioned before the game starts, or weighted letter draws based on the current board state and the potential number of scorable points per player? And perhaps more importantly, why?
Maybe you could spend points to pick two letter and keep the best...
Why? Because then 1) you'd know what that rule would do, and 2) maybe it'd be neat! Like, maybe you'd find an easy way to provide more balance between newbs and experts, or minimize the variation in score against a given opponent, or whatever.
What's interesting to me is that it's not just anagrams. It's anagrams with letters alphabetically sorted.
So you learn the key, the sorted word, and associate with it the sensibly ordered version (calling it sensible might be a bit of a stretch for some weird words or words in foreign language).
As you play, you sort your letters and try to match then with learned keys by omiting some of the letters and possibly including some letters that you see on the board.
Then out of all the options you have you try to pick the one that's most beneficial for you at this point according to game mechanic because it scores a lot for you, or prevents oponent from scoring, or leaves you enough letter for to score next round.
But you can imagine that memorizing as many pairs of (sorted letter, word) so that they come to you effortlessly is pretty much basic requirement to play the game any good.
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.egjackson.... iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lexatious/id1614332855
In a nutshell you race to form a path of words across a board, while your opponent tries to form a path from the top to the bottom.
I had a moment like this when I was obsessed with Scrabble — studying and playing 20+ hours a week.
I saw a guy at work with Demetrius on his nametag. Instantly I saw that “with another U you could make ‘deuteriums.’” It was the weirdest feeling because I had no idea where that realization came from.
I lost probably 4 years in my 20s to Scrabble and then quit cold turkey. I’m about 40 now and I’m pretty good at Wordle and the other NYT word games but that’s about it.
She loved being able to play long-distance with family members, and even met some new people to chat and play with from other countries.