Talkin’ ’bout My Degeneration

Scrabble FridgeThis week, NPR wrote about how the French Scrabble tournament had been won by Nigel Richards, a New Zealander who doesn’t speak any French, but who spent a few weeks studying a French dictionary. Don’t get me wrong, that’s an extremely impressive learning curve for Mr. Richards — one that I suspect classifies him as a sooper-genius. But otherwise I was utterly unshocked by the news.

You see, I learned a lot about Scrabble several years ago when I read an intriguing book about the game called Word Freak (2001), which talked about the culture of tournament-level Scrabble. What struck me most was how unlike casual play this tournament play was. Players obsessively memorized two-letter words, then three-letter words. They studied the Scrabble Dictionary to mind their Qs and Zs. 538.com famously described the results of high-level Scrabble play as looking like it’s “played in Martian”.

And that’s much of why I don’t think Scrabble is a good design.

It’s a degenerate game. Continue reading

Five Games I’m Thankful For: ’05

Happy Thanksgiving to all you Americans. Since I have the misfortune to post on Thanksgiving Day proper, I figure there’s only a few dozen of you reading, max (and that only thanks to the International nature of the Internet), and so I’ve decided to go with a pretty light & fluffy topic this week: five games I’m thankful for.

They’re not necessarily the best games I’ve played, nor even the games that I’ve played the most — but in various ways they’ve made me happy over the years. When I’ve reviewed the game in question, I also included a link to my review over at RPGnet. Go check that out for some more thoughts on the game in question.
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Five Games I Don’t Like

Often when I review I choose to talk about games that I like, to help spread the love and bring more gamers into the fold of my favorites. It’s a rarity that I specifically pull out a bad game to write a review about — unless it seems to be generating a lot of unwarranted publicity (or unless I’ve been given a review copy, which pretty much necessitates a review unless it was sent to me cold).

This week, however, I want to change things up a bit, and to talk about a number of the games that I don’t like, all of which are considered classics.
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