An experiment in controlling how much of Scrabble is luck | Hacker News Reader

An experiment in controlling how much of Scrabble is luck

nautil.us

72 pointsdnetesn59 comments

In my family, we play a variation that makes the game much more skillful. I'm not sure how common it is. But my grandmother's claim to fame is that she played in college with the inventor of Scrabble, before it was commercialized (the rules were different). These are the variations we play:

1) a dictionary can be used whenever you want, to look up a specific word in mind only (you cannot leaf through it for ideas)

2) When it is your turn, before playing your letters, you may swap a letter in your hand, for a letter on the board. This can be done as much as you like, but only one letter at a time, and each letter must make a new, valid word. No points are scored when swapping.

The result is that turns can take 10 minutes or more, but bingos are very common and individual scores get into 5-600 points often. There is much more skill and very little luck- as you are not limited by the letters you draw- rather, you can use just about any letter that's on the board, if you can get it! Likewise, if you draw the X you are not "lucky" because the X will likely get used again and again over the course of the game by multiple players.

I'm not sure how common this variation is, but I like it, and it's well-suited for serious players.

With the swapping, this sounds more similar to Bananagrams! I also like that it places less emphasis on memorizing words that are helpful in scrabble but not real life.

Do you happen to remember how the rules were different? I'm very curious. I also want to try your variation of the rules, swapping letters already on the board adds a whole new dimension, very intriguing.

When I play I generally allow both players are allowed to use the dictionary whenever they want (whether or not it is your turn), for whatever reason. You can combine this rule with time controls (there are a few possibilities for time controls, one way is to use chess clocks); if you take too long to look up the word while it is your turn, you are penalized by the time controls.

That swapping rule look like a interesting variant. A variant I have though of is that you can change the meaning of blanks on the board at any time during your turn as long as they are still valid words (valid both before and after your play, with the same letter being represented in both cases); this avoids having to remember what letter it is supposed to be. Another variant allows you to rearrange the letters of words you extend; if that changes words you cross, you score for the new words it makes. The mention in the article of removing bingo also can be a variant.

My family's modified rule was the ability to play off of used multiplier tiles, leading to fun with super high scores. Always a thrill to have a word take up one entire edge of the board while reaping the extra multiplier(s).

The letter swapping sounds fun!

   a dictionary can be used whenever you want, to look up a specific word in mind only (you cannot leaf through it for ideas)

I really dislike this idea. It turns the human into a mere mechanical Turk, searching through the dictionary. Fails to reward those who have built up a large vocabulary and draws out turns agonizingly.

I would argue that it makes it much less "skillful".

Horrible ;)

> searching through the dictionary.

Sounds like they explicitly forbid this.

> Fails to reward those who have built up a large vocabulary

You need to know the word exists to search for it, and larger vocabs will still be an advantage.

I did not say searching through the _entire_ dictionary. It is still removing one of the skills that Scrabble traditionally rewards: knowing how to spell.

He said...

...to look up a specific word in mind only (you cannot leaf through it for ideas)

So you wouldn't be a mechanical turk searching through it under his ruleset.

So just searching through a smaller space in the dictionary rather than the entire dictionary. It's still turning a feat of human skill and memory (remembering what words exist and how they are spelled) into a mere sideshow.

I'm glad someone did these experiments. I find that Scrabble begins to seem unfair after a certain level: there is certainly a great deal of strategy involved, but just as much of the game involves memorizing a fairly arbitrary collection of words: "za" is allowed, but "ok" is not, and there are far too many obscure transliterations of Arabic terms. The Scrabble Dictionary is more-or-less synonymous with the game itself, and the if the idea of memorizing a particular dictionary is already of dubious entertainment value, this is not improved by using a bad dictionary.

Scrabble is a classic game. The basic idea seems great. I just wish you could have a Scrabble game without having to say, "Seriously, that is considered a word? This game is ridiculous!" and feeling like the other person has an unfair advantage.

Scrabble isn't a word game. It's an area-control game with 150,000 rules to define legal placement for your resources. Some of those rules have mnemonics in the form of words you know.

As many have commented, there are two Scrabbles.

Below a certain level, it is a fun “beer and pretzels” game, where having a good vocabulary helps, and when someone plays an unusual word, the other players “ooh” and”aah.”

Abive a certain level, it is a strategy game requiring a large memorized list of allowable combinations of tiles to play, and the correspondance to actual words has no more significance than the shape of a rook in chess resembling a tower.

The gap between the two games is tremendous, and this is, in my opinion, the game’s only fault. It’s very intimidating to enjoy the beer and pretzels game, but discover that in order to play seriously, it’s not just 10,000 hours of study, but much of that will be rote memorization.

But nevrtheless, the beer and pretzels version of the game is also a valid pursuit. It’s just not the Scrabble you choose to play.

Unlike a game such as Go, in Scrabble once you place your pieces they are no longer only yours and can now be used by both players to add on more pieces next to them (although you do get payment for placing them at first, especially at positions with multipliers, since then your opponent can't use those multipliers).

However, if you do not use all of your cards in one turn, you will keep some and can plan ahead a bit, for use later.

> Unlike a game such as Go, in Scrabble once you place your pieces they are no longer only yours and can now be used by both players to add on more pieces next to them

Yes, this is an important aspect of area control in Scrabble. Scrabble is about not letting other players play on high-scoring spaces. It's not enough to take them when you can; you have to avoid playing near those tiles so that your opponents won't be able to play on them.

I've played where each player gets a sheet of all 2 letter words to balance this feeling.

Any list of words will have both inclusions and exclusions that someone finds objectionable.

The exclusion of "OK" is hardly arbitrary; it isn't allowed because it isn't pronounced "ock". Compare RADAR / LASER / SCUBA / LIDAR vs CD / SMS / PC / BM

Ok is being added.

https://www.cnet.com/news/its-finally-ok-to-play-ok-as-a-scr...

So, it's very arbitrary.

Apparently “ok” was recently added.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/score-scr...

yes, OK will become tournament valid in February of next year.

If you're playing the board game, you can agree to use your own dictionary.

The problem is that the allowed two- and three-letter words matter the most, and using a game-specific dictionary at least provides an authoritative list, if not a good one. The omission of "ok" from the official dictionary is likely deliberate, and there is at least some etymological reasoning behind that. The inclusion of "za" is more nonsensical, but as a two-letter word which uses "z", it's extremely common in gameplay, and could be argued as being important enough to merit inclusion simply to make the game easier. I'm not sure that there is any good solution to this. I think that high-level Scrabble might simply fail to be a very good game.

My girlfriend loves Scrabble but hates the list of nonsensical but allowed two letter words, so in our version they aren’t allowed.

An exception is made for “qi”, just because. Mine is not to question why, simply to regularly lose.

QAT has saved my bacon so many times.

Qi is too sweet to relinquish.

As a tournament Scrabble player, high-level Scrabble is actually an extremely good game, one of the best ever made. There is a huge amount of depth to it. I can expound upon it some more, but don't know how interested people would be.

I am currently in Boston for a tournament - the Can-Am (Canada vs USA championship).

I don’t doubt that high level Scrabble is intriguing, but I think the problem (if you even want to call it a problem) is that it’s effectively a completely different game than the casual game of Scrabble.

Casual Scrabble is all about coming up with fairly well-known words. Serious Scrabble, I presume, is about controlling board position armed with a vast knowledge of legal words.

As soon as someone in a casual game plays a questionable esoteric word that, if challenged, turns out to be a legal word, the casual game becomes a lot less fun for everyone involved.

Your presumption about serious Scrabble is actually very accurate. The actual words themselves don’t even matter that much. I practice anagramming during a lot of my free time, to the point where seeing letters like EOHISTRE immediately (within less than half a second) brings up theories, theorise, isothere in my head. The game is largely about controlling the board, rough probability calculations, inferencing of your opponent’s tiles from their previous moves, etc etc. There’s a lot to it. It hasn’t even been seriously solved by a computer (the best AI does not beat the best player more than 50% of the time).

Don't the high level players of every game think their game is one of the best ever made?

Presumably they wouldn't devote that much energy to something if they didn't regard it as such.

They also probably aren't high level players in enough other games to give a credible comparison among all the possible contenders, simply due to the time required to become high level in multiple games.

Ah, is this open to the public? Where is it being held?

In Cambridge, MA at a community center. It is not quite open to the public. You have to be a member of the North American Scrabble Players Association (www.scrabbleplayers.org - $30/year) and have amassed a high enough ELO to qualify for this tournament. There are many tournaments held all over the country that are open to any NASPA members though. I'm excited for it! I represented the US in 2013 in Vancouver and we won that one.

I agree. I think that Scrabble is a great game which, by its very design, cannot be an interesting game at serious competitive levels. It’s great fun to play with a group of friends who will accept words on an unspoken honor system. But as soon as there is serious competition with meaningful stakes, it reduces almost entirely to the arbitrary choice of word lists.

The same is true for a lot of great party games. Scattergories is a great example. As soon as it becomes seriously competitive, the key rule (that everyone votes whether to allow each submission) effectively ruins the fun.

No, it's interesting at the low level (play with the words you know) and interesting at the "serious" level (memorize a substantial portion of the 250,000 words). You can tell the latter because there are plenty of serious Scrabble tournaments.

It breaks down somewhere in the middle, where you play with your group of friends but want to be competitive, and it turns out someone gains a huge advantage by learning all the 2- and 3- letter words, all the "Q without U" words, or whatever. One imperfect way to address this is to print out the 2- and 3- letter words and make them available to everyone.

It is not true at all that it’s not an interesting game at the higher levels. There’s so much more to scrabble than just whether a word is good or not.

a list of allowed two-letter words on a piece of paper, with the game, and updated from time to time by agreements, solves this well ! local example - 'IQ' is not allowed, but 'Qi' is on the list..

The high level players will memorize all 3 letter words and sometimes 4 letter words as well. Their scrabble-dictionary vocabularies are incredible. Here's an old article about the highest score ever (at the time). It included a triple triple worth 365 points alone for QUIXOTRY. https://slate.com/technology/2006/10/830-how-a-carpenter-got...

the high level players will memorize all words until 9 letters, and some even know those and beyond. I know all the 2-8 (approximately 80K words) pretty well, although not as well as I'd like.

What odds would you give that that word has been used more than five times in the history of English literature?

Turns out to be both more common and mean something a little different than I thought: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=quixotry&year_... https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=quixotry

Quixotic which I think that's derived from isn't that obscure.

Google Books returns over 8000 results, and some of them aren't even dictionaries!

The corpus I searched returned no results, but I'll take the correction: mea culpa.

I don't understand why the article portraits the described game as unworthy of the high score. An experienced player will always hedge, and thereby the high scores will all go to less bothered players gambling their way to a win.

In my opinion, all of the best games have some portion of luck in them, but a larger portion of skill. Catan is boring to me because dice rolls determine too much of the game; chess is boring to me because I know I'm always going to lose unless I feel like investing hundreds of hours into learning the game. Scrabble is one of the few pre-Euros that manages to get the luck to skill balance right.

The skill of having a larger vocabulary is actually useful IRL, so that helps a bit. There's another part of it that's the game itself, like knowing all of the two-letter words, which isn't quite as useful.

In case anyone else didn't understand "pre-Euros" in this context: it refers to the abstract, strategy-oriented styles of table game that first became popular in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurogame

> chess is boring to me because I know I'm always going to lose unless I feel like investing hundreds of hours into learning the game.

If you play against well calibrated opponents, like you'd do in any club or in online chess, you're going to win/lose 50/50 (not counting draws).

That's independent of how many hours you put into the game. All that's going to change with more practice is a richer understanding of what's going on on the board.

This is why my backgammon and cribbage are my favorites of the classic parlor games. Scrabble is fun until you get to a high level, at which point it gets degenerate wrt memorizing words.

There’s also an interesting relationship between luck and time. If games are short, you can play more of them and luck will matter less over time. Anyone can win one poker hand, but it takes some skill to win a tournament.

Surprised that no one mentioned Duplicate Scrabble, which is the most common tournament form in France. Ar each round, everyone gets the same draw and submits their best word. The overall best word is kept and added to the board.

This completely eliminates the luck factor, as everyone gets the same draw at each round. Missing an “easy” bingo in one round is a surefire way to lose. Obviously this means that to play at a competitive level, you need to memorize all possible words up to 9 letters or so. Fun fact: the current top player of French scrabble is from New Zealand and doesn’t speak a word of French. He just memorized all ~200k valid words in the OSD.

Needless to say, this version is vastly less fun to play casually.

If I understand your description of the rules correctly, it sounds like that removes any sort of strategy from the game (manipulating the board and the rack), making it a sequence of Scrabble puzzles instead with no between-player interaction. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, but I think it would remove a lot of the interest for many people (me included).

I have read about Nigel Richards, the New Zealander French Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French, and I think that the game he is the champion of is "regular" Scrabble (with French vocabulary). For example the Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-fre... talks about his "pretty rotten draw of letters".

Edited: Ah, I see from his Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe...) that he has won both Classique and Duplicate titles.

Your understanding of the Duplicate rules is correct. It removes any element of chance (all players are judged on how well they manage a given draw) but it also removes any element of strategy. As an aside, it also makes it a lot easier to organize large scale tournaments - you can organize a Duplicate game with any number of players.

I find it a lot less fun to play, but I know serious players who don’t understand why you would play Classic scrabble.

If you are playing a game with people of various skill levels it is a good thing to have a decent amount of luck involved or one person will win all the time (unless they lose on purpose). That is not enjoyable, especially for the losers. In tournament play, where you are ranked and play against similarly skilled opponents, it makes sense that upping the skill factor can increase fun, but for casual home play, not so much.

My family has quite a bit of variance in skill levels in scrabble and we have different rules depending on who is playing. When the skill levels are very mixed, we allow one word lookup for free and then the next word must be in the dictionary to play (ie. no need to challenge and possibly lose your turn). We also have a list of two letter words you can consult.

This works pretty well and when only the hard core players are playing we go back to the official rules.

(Off topic) In case anyone is intrigued by the post /How to Build a Probability Microscope/ linked from the article, I created a JavaScript/Python-based simulation:

The linked article: http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/-how-to-build-a-probability-m...

The simulation: https://www.speicherleck.de/iblech/zufall-im-browser/index.e... (select the bottommost example)

Can confirm bingos are luck. My only win against my mom in scrabble was a 1st turn bingo that she challenged and lost (EJECTOR, she was less than 50% sure that the "or" was wrong, but didn't want to concede a 1st turn bingo that was questionable).

Since a decent chunk of the observed skill of Scrabble experts comes from points from getting bingos more frequently, it seems you've discovered that Luck is an intrinsic statistic of humans. Interesting!

The penalty for an incorrect challenge is losing a turn isn't it? So it might be worthwhile to challenge if you were only 40% sure if you thought you couldn't get 20 points on your turn.

you make your own luck. I average around 2 bingos per game.

clearly the data suggests that its bingos that make up most of the luck in the game.

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