On Club Day, the committee member responsible for preparing the player draws for each game also announces a spot prize — awarded to the player who plays a word that best meets a stated challenge.
The tools of our board game are 100 letter tiles and a player’s knowledge of words and variant spellings contained in the official Scrabble dictionary. It may seem simple enough to announce, before the start of Game 2, something like: “Highest scoring word containing three or more different vowels.”
But coming up with letter clues and word challenges that add interest to a game is not always as simple as it seems.
To retain their competitive edge, players study useful words and think carefully about how best to position tiles so their wordplay scores well.
A challenge must be clear and set at the right level. At our club, playing strength ranges from beginner through to Grand Master. What seems obvious to one player may not be so obvious to another.
There is always something to learn from drafting these challenges. A clue that appears easy to write at first can prove less easy to understand.
Last week, I drafted a list of fourteen clues for an upcoming 14-game Mid-Winter themed tournament. The degree of difficulty needs to be at a competitive level. For example, an expert player and I discussed at length, this briefly worded draft challenge:
Game 2: Highest scoring word containing ICE in order
How might a competitive Scrabble player read and understand this? We paused.
"ICE in order” felt slightly ambiguous.
Must the letters I–C–E appear consecutively?
Does "in order" mean in that sequence, anywhere within the word?
Does “containing” imply that the letters may be separated?
And so, it went. There should be no uncertainty about letter sequence requirements — yet there we were, questioning our own wording. Only thirteen more to think about.
It seems that even in a game devoted to words, we must choose them very carefully.
— Scrabble Notebook
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