Friday, March 15, 2013

Scrabble Puzzle

I like Scrabble, for many reasons.

I like words. I like to write. I like to read.

But one of the things I like best about Scrabble is how it is so much like life.

Every time I play a game of Scrabble, something totally amazing about the pattern of play in that game will strike me:

"Check it out! Ten turns and not a single letter E was used!"

"Whoa, that's amazing. Every word that contains an A also contains the letter I!"

and so on.

So why do I say Scrabble is like life? Because both Scrabble and life are filled with patterns that seem to be very amazing and profound, but in fact are meaningless, nothing more than coincidences to which our brain happens to be attuned.

OK, time for the Scrabble Puzzle:

A week ago, I played a game of Scabble with Veva and scored 36 points by placing the word "SEEN" on the board.

Now, every letter in "SEEN" is worth 1 point, making it very difficult to get to 36 points. But I attached "SEEN" to a word on the board (of course!) and I got my 36 points by using a total of 8 letters, two of which were worth 3 points and the other 5 were worth 1 point each.

Still not a whole lot of points to work from.

So how was I able to get to 36 points? I will post the answer next week.

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