Scrabble is ridiculous

I sat down to my first game of Scrabble in a long time with my little brother.


Halfway into the game, after getting stuck with a draw of seven vowel tiles (*insert your favourite expletive*!), I decided to cheat and looked up the wordlists in an underused Scrabble tactics and strategy manual I bought in 2003. Hey, I had helped my brother on his previous turn which had given him the highest scoring word to have emerged in the entire play: laying down JUKE beneath TEA (bonuses: J on a double-letter score, and the blank tile on a triple-word score!) . I thought I was deserving of a little quid pro quo.


I guess you can see that neither of us are expert Scrabble Players. We had almost completely eliminated any opportunity to expand our way upwards on the right border of the board. And unless anyone was lucky enough to get 'D' and 'Y', we could kiss goodbye to the middle bottom Triple Word Score. Conditions were just as worse across the rest of the board. But I was confident that the manual could help us out of our dire situation, and I wasn't too disappointed either. Check it out.


Deux ex machina! HAHAHA! We didn't have too much trouble after that.

For the curious, links to explanations of obscure words from our game: Euouae, Hong, Te (it pays to know your two-letter words well!)

All photos courtesy of my Sony Ericsson W810i (it can shoot both macro and celestial objects!)