When you haven’t got the words, try a game of Scrabble

Scrabble is now 80 years old and, even with the explosion in technology, it is a game that has never lost its charm, writes Niamh Hennessy.

The board game, Scrabble is something many people will have tucked away in a cupboard or deep under the stairs. It could make a brief special appearance at Christmas or the odd dinner party.

This year marks 80 years since Scrabble was invented by unemployed US architect, Alfred Butts in 1938 in New York.

Even with the explosion of technology and the introduction of thousands of other board games over the years, Scrabble has never lost its charm.

It was originally called Criss-Crosswords and was renamed Scrabble years later. With very little changing since the game was originally invented all those years ago, it has survived to remain the number two most popular board game in the world (after Monopoly).

When designing Scrabble, Alfred Butts analysed the front page of the New York Times to determine the value of the letters. To this day this analysis remains key to the game.

The letter ‘Q’ is one that occurs least often in English text which has resulted in just one tile of that letter in Scrabble, carrying a value of 10 points.

In Ireland, Scrabble has not only survived in the hundreds and thousands of houses around the country but also within the Scrabble groups who meet weekly to play with other players. There are Scrabble groups in Cork, Dublin, Belfast and Wexford.

Finbarr Long is a member of the All Ireland Scrabble Association and helps run the Cork Scrabble Group.

“I have been playing Scrabble competitively for the past 25 years and would be a mid-ranking player. I started to play originally while at UCC in the early 1970s and I was involved in setting up and running the Irish Scrabble rating system for a number of years before it became computerised,” he said.

Finbarr, who retired from Cork City Council in 2014, plays with the Cork Scrabble group every Wednesday night at the SMA in Wilton. The Cork group is just one of the 4,000 Scrabble groups worldwide.

Former Irish champion, Feargal Weatherhead, recently arrived back from Berlin where himself and his wife Pauline were playing in the German Open Scrabble Tournament. He came fourth.

Fergal said: “I’ve been playing Scrabble seriously since 2005. Before that I played at home, at Christmas like everyone else. I was not particularly good when I started and I had to do a good bit of work but I got hooked on the game. I love words and I love the challenge.”

Scrabble is now sold in 121 countries and available in 29 languages. To date over 150 million sets have been sold worldwide.

Finbarr said:

There are thousands of people in Ireland who can and do play Scrabble. The beauty of Scrabble is that games can be played and enjoyed at all levels, either socially amongst family and friends, or at club level and at tournament level.

In Ireland, there are around 100 players who compete in tournaments. To promote the game and to co-ordinate events, club players formed a national association about 20 years ago, called RISPA (Republic of Ireland Scrabble Players Association).

There was a corresponding organisation in Northern Ireland (NISPA), and about six years ago it was decided to amalgamate the two groups in the All Ireland Scrabble Association (AISA).

“There are generally about five weekend tournaments held around the country each year, attracting about 30 to 40 players, along with a number of more local one day tournaments,” said Finbarr.

The current Irish champion is Lukeman Owolabi. He was a teenager when he started playing Scrabble in Nigeria. He represented Nigeria at the African Scrabble championship in 2002 and in 2005 went to the UK to represent his country at the World Scrabble Championship. He now lives in Cork with his family.

The game is made up of 100 letters, of which 42 are vowels, 56 consonants and two blanks.

Allowable words are approved by the World English Scrabble Association and this is revised every four to five years.

Fergal said: “There are 124 allowable two letter words and knowing these is a big advantage in enabling to join on to existing words. These two letter words are the building blocks of Scrabble.”

High scoring letters two letter word examples would be JA, JO, KA, KI, KO, QI, AX, EX, OX, XI, XU, ZA AND ZO.

“Good scores can be achieved by playing high scoring letters on triple letter squares,” said Finbarr.

“A good tip is to have four consonants and three vowels on a rack at any one time. Using all seven letters on your rack gets you 50 extra points and blanks are the most valuable tiles,” he added.

For anyone looking to dust off the Scrabble board one tip from the experts is that if you are lucky enough to gather the right letters, you can score 1782 on a single word — Oxyphenbutazone.