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Scrabble: Not Just A Word Game

Scrabble is commonly cited as being the world’s most popular word game. Truly, Scrabble is a popular board game played throughout the world on kitchen tables and in a thriving international tournament scene. Is it, however, accurate to describe Scrabble as a word game?

At face value, a bag of one hundred letter tiles with each player having racks of seven letters at a time from which to form words and place on the board, it may appear to be a word game. On a closer examination, one must question that common assumption.

If Scrabble was truly a word game, one could expect that the most expert players would be those players with the best linguistic skills. These would include authors, journalists, language professors and similar professions. The reality tells a different story. These occupations are a rarity amongst Scrabble players at the top of the international competitive ranks.

If you were to survey the participants at any of the biennial World Scrabble Championships, you would discover a very significant proportion of these elite level Scrabble players come from mathematics, actuarial, accounting, architectural and engineering occupations. These professions reflect the strategic skills, the critical and strategic thinking skills and the mathematical and statistical skills that marks the difference between a winner and loser in Scrabble, or the difference between a masters level competitor and an intermediate or novice player.

Vocabulary is far less important than one might initially imagine in a Scrabble game. Whilst obviously vocabulary plays an important, in fact essential, role in the game, vocabulary alone won’t win many Scrabble games. You could liken it a little to war. In a battle, one side may have a majority of the weapons and even a larger army, though without a solid strategic battle plan the war is all but over before it even begins. Without a strong battle plan, the biggest army with the most weapons will not defeat their opposition.

On the Scrabble board, strategic decisions are made with every move. You may have a great word ready to play, but which is the best position on the board to play it? There will often be multiple positions where a word could be played. Rapid mental calculations need to be made as to which position will produce the highest score. Even then, it may not always be wise to play in the highest scoring position if, for example, it opens up a triple-triple bonus scoring opportunity to your opponent. Settling for a different position on the board for a lower score may sometimes be the better strategic decision.

Likewise, the strategic player considers the balance between vowels and consonants in the rack. It is often the wise choice to play a small scoring word and maintain a well balanced rack than to go for a higher scoring word that leaves you with no vowels at all for your next move.

The strategic player will also consider the statistical probabilities of drawing good tiles from the Scrabble letter bag. Playing away a single tile from your rack in the hope of picking up the Q is generally unwise due to the low probability of actually picking out that Q. The same play for the purposes of picking up a far more common letter that you need to form your next bonus word, such as an E, can more often be rewarding.

To further reinforce the case that Scrabble isn’t primarily a word game, a look at some of the recent victors in international tournaments tells a vivid story. A growing trend is for competitors from countries such as Thailand and Malaysia, where English is not even the primary language, to walk away with the tournament trophies. What these competitors may lack in terms of every day English language vocabulary, they more than compensate with their strategic, mathematical, statistical and logic skills.