Way back in 2006, I reverse engineered the protocol used between isc.ro and its desktop client so that I could write my own GUI. It was just a fun side project.
In the process I discovered all sorts of vulnerabilities (potential cheating vectors). Nothing prevented a malicious client from:
- picking your own tiles (even if they no longer exist in the bag)
- seeing your opponent's tiles
- setting your clock to any value after making a move
- aborting a game at any time without opponent approval
If you exchanged tiles, the number of tiles you exchanged was sent through the # of seconds on your clock. So if you exchanged 3 tiles at a point where you had 1m40s on your clock, it would change to 1m43s or 1m33s or something like that! There was no other way to communicate to the server how many tiles you exchanged.
I never took advantage of any of this. Like I said, I just wanted a nicer GUI to play Scrabble on. But I was pretty shocked at what I discovered in the process.
I have a theory that you are a board game family or you are not.
We were not a board game family, apart from the occasional attempt to get through Monopoly without my little sister flinging it onto the floor. My partner, however is from board game people. When we're with her family, there are dice and cards and tokens, words and numbers fly through the air, and I am utterly lost. I played Scrabble with her once. I used to think I was smart.
Monopoly is pretty much the worst board game to introduce children to.
> [Elizabeth Magie] originally intended The Landlord's Game to illustrate the economic consequences of Ricardo's Law of economic rent and the Georgist concepts of economic privilege and land value taxation.
Monopoly Deal on the other hand is an excellent game, quick to play (10-15 minutes), works well for 2, 3 or 4 players and the rules are clear and simple. Not to mention how cheap it is, usually less than $5.
Yes, Amazon had it as a stocking-filler a few Christmases ago at $4. The card version is fast and requires no board, so can be played with kids aged 8+, on a restaurant counter/ park bench/ bus/ plane/ whatever. There is a small amount of strategy and remembering what has been dealt, but BoardGameArena rates it easy (complexity 1.3/5).
I come from a (board) game family, and competitive family. I loved games as kid, computer games and board games and physical sports (even though I was bad at most sports, with the exception of running and stealth which is useful for 'levend stratego' [1]). But with my kids I don't enjoy board gaming much yet, as they get angry quickly. I like playing with them, but when it has to go their way solely I feel like 'OK, go solo, you can have control.'
I play Wordfeud (a Scrabble clone) with my wife and mother. The three of us are quite competitive with each other. My mother-in-law played a few games, lost each of them, and then called it. Because her idea of having fun is, well, not doing your best. My mother had colleagues whom she played games with (quizzes I think?), and they were terrible simply because she doesn't care. An old book on this is 'Play To Win' by Dave Sirlin.
Anyway, legend has it the people who are best at Scrabble are from an SE Asian country (not sure which one it was), often barely speak English, but know all the 2 and 3 letter combinations and are able to lay those down well.
There are plenty of good board games out now that are cooperative in nature, rather than competitive. Maybe start with those if there are anger issues? I really enjoy this one in particular with my younger relatives https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/209778/magic-maze
I love Magic Maze dearly, but I would be hard-pressed to name a co-op that causes more anger. It features my favorite individual token from any board game, the comically oversized "Do Something Pawn," whose entire purpose is to be slammed in front of someone when you want them to do something. Do what? You can't tell them due to the rules, but what you can do is continue to slam the pawn with increasing ferocity.
I suppose this isn't the only way to play Magic Maze. But why settle for less? :)
It's not just the 2 or 3 letter combinations, but knowing the combinations that work well together to form bingos (using all 7 letters) that lead to better chances for victory.
I just wonder, since they don't know English, but do recognize the patterns of words, couldn't one play what merely resemble words if it's beneficial? That is, play the "word", "HACKISH" to score at least 69 points (19 for letters + 50 for the bingo).
Apparently there’s a lot more involved than fitting rare words into nooks. This video blew my mind a little bit. Top players reason about words like chess pieces
Scrabble is interesting because average people think about it like a casual game, but it's nearly as strategic as chess despite significant randomness. Most people play with a completely greedy approach. Thinking just one move ahead about rack and board state is enough to beat someone with a great vocabulary but no strategy.
Nigel Richards (who tournament scrabble players regard as the game's undisputed GOAT) did not win the French championships just by having an eidetic memory (though it surely helps!), he is also amazingly good at the tactics and strategy of scrabble, including anagramming, board vision, rack balancing, and calculation of probabilities and lookahead. there is a considerable amount of "intelligence" involved, however you want to define that.
I am not really getting why people are praising the article, it is mostly autobiographical naval-gazing by the authour. I think it is an uninteresting way to explore the topic where the writer focuses on themselves than the topic.
It’s not navel-gazing, it’s an expression of the mind of another presented in a way that is entertaining for others to read. In seeing the obsessions of another, we see the same in ourselves. I’d also posit that the author has read a bit of David Foster Wallace over the years, because the tone and themes are similar to some of his work, both the fiction and non-fiction. Perhaps these kind of diaristic long-form articles aren’t really for you.
Perhaps the topic is not Scrabble, as you assume, but actually the internal voice of an addict who has transferred their addiction to anagramming and other word thoughts.
I could see how others would feel they can relate to that.
This is an interesting read. As a software engineer who accidentally discovered the depth of Scrabble in middle age, I fell down a slightly different Scrabble rabbit hole. The probabilities behind the imperfect bag/rack state knowledge fascinate me, and I spent most of a year writing a strong Scrabble engine to explore the problem. I've put that aside for now, but it remains a background pressure on the computing problems I tackle.
I would like to also point out https://woogles.io as a mobile-friendly place to play Scrabble, either against humans or against bots with different "ability levels".
Thanks for posting. I've been a user of the Internet Scrabble Club for over 15 years now. I came to it after learning of competitive scrabble from reading Word Freak by Stephan Fatsis [1].
I had a background playing internet chess. I started with yahoo and gravitated towards lightning (1/0 time controls). I think there's more than a grain of truth to the quotation, "I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol." ~ attributed to Nigel Short, English grandmaster. Fast-paced board games that deliver rewards are addictive.
As a student of neurotransmitters, I can attest that playing blitz chess or scrabble does result in dopamine hits. Particular to Scrabble, one can receive such a hit of dopamine from a bingo (50 point bonus for playing all seven tiles). In a three minute (or less) time control, a medium to expert player can look forward to an average of two of these per game. All that's missing from this slot machine is the lights and sounds.
Isc.ro is a unique little corner of the internet. It's navigated away from a downloaded console to a browser. It has its fair share of persistent trolls. There's a chat room, channel 20, that used to regularly have over 100 members active at any given time, and significantly more than that during peak hours.
Competitive scrabble as a community peaked, IMO, in 2004 with the nationals in New Orleans. There's a Sports Illustrated article chronicling its subsequent problems [2]. NASPA in particular is undemocratic in its governance and pushed a woke agenda during the pandemic, resulting in the removal of hundreds of words from the official lexicons. The net result is there are now at least 4 dictionaries, fracturing an already small and arguably dwindling community of word enthusiasts.
An alternative to NASPA in the competitive Scrabble tournament and club scene is WGPO [3]. My personal experience is that most mid-size cities have clubs, and you'll meet worthwhile people in them. I liked to say, at a Scrabble club I always felt comfortable that I was typically not the most nor the least odd fellow there but rather squarely in the middle of the pack.
I've noticed a pattern at the Internet Scrabble Club that I also noticed at the Free Internet Chess Server (fics.org), where I migrated after Yahoo games was phased out: a loss of members. ISC now competes with numerous viable alternatives easily accessible from a smartphone. In its heyday, it was unique place where you could navigate the interface with telnet commands. [Insert finger pun here.]
Competitive scrabble certainly isn't helped by the fact that, unlike other relatively mainstream games such as chess, it's jointly owned by Mattel and Hasbro.
yeah, that is without doubt the biggest millstone around scrabble's neck. the community could have done a lot more were it able to freely develop the game and surrounding activities.
Probably Mattel/Hasbro and trademark/copyright issues.
Official mobile games have to be ruined by aggressive monetisation and scammy in-app ads, it seems.
Words With Friends got away with a making A Scrabble clone by using a slightly different board layout and dictionary. But they eventually transformed that into a very annoying experience overloaded with the usual F2P clutter.
WordFeud seems to be the recommended mobile Scrabble clone these days.
I play Wordfeud almost every day, and it is the best 3$ (I think it was 3$ at the time I paid for it years ago, not sure what it costs now) I ever spent on an app.
So how does Wordfeud get around copyright issues with Hasbro? Do they pay them a royalty?
It’s $6 now. And I’m happy to pay it. The official scrabble app is a horrible testament to psychotic UI’s being passed off as “normal”. I swear to god, it’s like living in a clockwork orange. I just want to play the game but there are chests and gemstones and adds you can watch and unlocks mid game and on and on…
It is just nuts. I installed a mobile game couple of days ago, liked it. Paid 4.99 to "remove ads" without realizing that it only removed some ads. They got me. I uninstalled it, 5$ down the toilet.
I understand game makers need to pay rent too, that is why I spent that 5$ to support them. But they treated their customer (me) like shit, lost me forever. Good job guys
This insatiable greed to make more and more and more money...Yikes
So far, Wordfeud hasn't done anything crappy like this. I hope they stay that way
I just played 2 games on wordfeud and wow it is both amazing and sad how little I need to be satisfied and how hard it is to find such an app. Anyways, I uninstalled scrabble and am invested in this one.
Not that I know of. The wikipedia article on ISC.ro [1] gives the handle (i.e., username) on the owner of the site, "Carol". I will say that migration to a browser-based interface has helped. It's now possible to play on a smart phone, albeit a bit awkward, with a small input line for commands.
Speaking to an earlier point, the domain of ".ro" may reflect a reality of who has licensing of Scrabble in Romania, and also outside of the U.S. and U.K. I'm not up to date on all of that.
https://www.michaelfogleman.com/projects/word-warrior/
In the process I discovered all sorts of vulnerabilities (potential cheating vectors). Nothing prevented a malicious client from:
- picking your own tiles (even if they no longer exist in the bag)
- seeing your opponent's tiles
- setting your clock to any value after making a move
- aborting a game at any time without opponent approval
If you exchanged tiles, the number of tiles you exchanged was sent through the # of seconds on your clock. So if you exchanged 3 tiles at a point where you had 1m40s on your clock, it would change to 1m43s or 1m33s or something like that! There was no other way to communicate to the server how many tiles you exchanged.
I never took advantage of any of this. Like I said, I just wanted a nicer GUI to play Scrabble on. But I was pretty shocked at what I discovered in the process.
Not sure if anything has changed since then!