Saturday, February 17, 2007

Triple Letter Score - Scrabble Redux

I recently found this old scrabble game at one of my local thrift shops: the Kirkland Art Center Thrift Shop in Clinton, NY. I paid $1.50 for it. And it's a good thing I found it, because my scrabble tile cache was getting dangerously low, after I used up 482 tiles doing this:The inside of the door to this original-to-my-house medicine cabinet had an indented space that was just perfectly sized for these tiles. So, just a few months into home ownership, I took a break from spackling and sanding and spackling and sanding, and spent a few hours doing this. It was great fun. I worked in a few big, nice words quite intentionally, but then ended up with more words by these two means: the completely fortuitous words, and the almost fortuitous words. These last ones I had to nudge into wordiness by a letter or two. I was surprised that the whole thing took 482 tiles - almost 5 games worth! This dashed my hopes of ever covering even a small wall in tiles! At least not until I've collected a hundred games or so....

4 comments:

lynneguist said...

I love it--though I wonder if some of my Scrabble mates will consider it to be sacrilege!

Incidentally, outside the US, Scrabble has come with plastic tiles for a very long time. Not as nice to look at and feel, but you can't 'braille' (i.e. try to feel the letters when picking the tiles out of the bag) the modern ones.

Celeste said...

Well, I hope that they at least see it as a worse sacrilege to have all those unwanted games end up in landfills. Plastic? Yuck! People should just not cheat. I wonder whether this means that there would be a market for old wooden tiled games in the U.K.

lynneguist said...

Incidentally, there was a story in the National Scrabble Association's newsletter some years ago about someone who wallpapered their half-bath with pages out of an old Scrabble dictionary--so that they could study words whenever they used the facilities. Recycling and learning--good combination!

Celeste said...

Well, since it might just take this side of forever to gather enough tiles to do a whole wall, maybe I should consider this intead!