On
how this bastardized version of Scrabble has killed the integrity of the game
With all the incredible features on today’s smartphones
(email, GPS, streaming music, barcode scanners, robot assistants), perhaps the
most utilized one of all is Words With Friends.
Where its muse, Scrabble, has become a relic of family game nights and
church basements, WWF has risen as a great time consumer and excuse for people
in the same room to not talk to each other.
For nearly a year, I held out on WWF, scoffing at
friends and family members fixated on their two by four inch screens. But alas, with an eminent surgery on the way
(meaning lots of bedridden time to kill), I gave in (sold out) and started a
WWF account. No stranger to Scrabble, I
figured I would easily vanquish my slower and less verbose acquaintances. But as the accumulated, I was perplexed on
how these dunderheads kept lambasting me.
Why weren’t my Scrabble skills working in WWF? The general game play and goals of the two are
the same: use letter tiles to create words and score points. Bonus spaces multiply letter and word
values. May the best logophile win. And yet, with all my gaudy SAT words in tow,
I ceased to prevail. Then one fateful
afternoon, whilst watching TV land, it hit me: KA! I’m playing Words with Batman.*
Examine a recent WWF board and you’ll likely find it littered with KAs,
QIs, ZAs, and BAPs. The vocabulary more
closely resembles a 1960’s Adam West fight scene than it does a lexical battle
amongst intellectual peers. Batman words
run rampant. WWF games are a repository
of obscure mini words, because these punch/kick sounds win games. A ‘Q’ placed in just the right spot (on a
triple letter space, between two I’s on different axes) can rake in 62 points
(by spelling QI twice). Now can anyone
tell me what QI means?** It’s
irrelevant. One tile, 62 points. The same goes for the word ZA, apparently an
acceptable shortening of ‘pizza’. With
yields that high from single letters, there’s not much incentive in going for
big words. Consider the fact that WWF
awards only 30 bonus points, as opposed to 50 in Scrabble, for using all of
one’s tiles in a single turn (known in the biz as a bingo) This 40% reward
reduction makes a big difference in how players choose to lay their tiles. A lone Q may end up scoring more points than QUICKENS,
even though it’s a bingo. In Scrabble, a
rack liquidating play is the grand slam of moves. In WWF, it’s more like a ground rule
double.
Bingo
bonuses aside, the main flaw with WWF is that it allows endless possible word
submissions, with no penalty attempting non-words. The original Scrabble has a rule hindering
players from laying down words that they don’t know. After the tiles are placed, an opponent may
“challenge” that potential word, at which point a dictionary is consulted. If the “word” in question is not in the dictionary,
the offending player loses a turn (and some pride). If the word is real, the challenger loses a turn. This is a thing of beauty: a built-in system
of checks and balances. The challenge
rule demands a certain confidence in one’s English proficiency, one not present
in WWF.
Without a challenge rule, we end up with a board
chock full of KAs, ZAs, and BAPs, as well some longer (and equally unknown) words
such as NEUSTON, BLIN, and GROK. Their
meanings unknown to the average player, words like these score big and win
games. Additionally, as more and more
2-3 letter words populate the board, a phenomenon known as the “staircase
effect” occurs. For fear of opening up
the board to an opponent, and because of the high point to tile ratio of
“Batman” words, players often layer tiles on top of each other, in a staircase
pattern of mini-words. Once a staircase
has begun, it’s hard to escape.
WWF
does not need to copy Scrabble’s challenge rule in order to restore integrity
to the game. In fact, a challenge rule
won’t even work for WWF, since opponents can only see words after they are
accepted and scored. Instead, I propose a
one strike policy. For each turn, a
player gets only one freebie. One shot
at making up a word. If the second
submission is not legit, that player loses a turn. It’s that simple. If you don’t know what you are playing, then
you don’t deserve points for it. Batman
words and staircases will become less common and gambles on words such as CROZE
will be just that, gambles. Words With Friends may have taken Scrabble
viral and put it in the palm or your hand, but it shouldn’t ruin the heart and
soul of the game: flexing one’s lexical nuts.
That’s simply flagitious.
--------------------------------
*This
never happened.
**The circulating life force whose existence and
properties are the basis of much Chinese philosophy and medicine.
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