Thursday 21 December 2006

A Nice Game Of Scrabble

Last post I advocated a lovely - no, 'Nice', game of Scrabble.

However, as I was reminded, Scrabble isn't always so nice. Once played sedately by polite families who wanted to build their 9-year-old's spelling and vocabulary skills, it blossomed into a sport which you'd be unwise to play without mouthguards and shinpads.

When I first played Scrabble, Mum would mumble "oooh, a P and a T and an E hmmm let's see, what can we do here ..., can I help you with your letters dear?"

Since then it's metamorphosised into a war-game. I settled down to a game where my opponents screamed "Block off tactics! Cover the left hand corner of the board. Lure her into using the P, then move towards the triple, and cut her off towards the top! Move into the Double and the Z area - if we can't use it, she can't either! Ah-har!"

Not only has Scrabble turned into a life and death tactics game, but it's become ... naughty. OK, sexual. You don't need to play 'Stone Face' (see below) to get a raunchy game going, a 'Nice' game of Scrabble can become a raunchy game of Scrabble, and for all those eagerly awaiting details, yes, you can still use your old 'nice' set.

In fact, it seems almost every game is going the sexy route (pardon the pun).

Ways To Spice Up Your Scrabble Life

1. Strip Scrabble

Each round, the person who made the lowest scoring word takes a bit of clothing off. Or gets it taken off. Either way, you've got someone naked sitting there pretty quickly, because let's face it, everyone knows there is:

a) Always someone who is a loser at Scrabble, and usually finds it difficult finding the two-pointer words. And that this person is usually an old, ugly, wrinkly or deformed person when you're playing Strip Scrabble.

b) Always some exhibitionist who will put out (a lot), oh yes, and also put out a lot of two-pointer words, just for an excuse to show off their body. They also tend to be the old, ugly, wrinkly or deformed people. And they're usually the most likely to be completely deluded about their looks.


2. Sex Dictionary Scrabble

Only words having to do with sex and dating can be formed on the board. Let the words intersect and intertwine. Length of word does count, a lot, but so does size and how you use it. And definitely how it fits in nicely and snugly with the spaces left by the other words.

See how many times you can get ORGASM on the triple word, and whether many players start their play with DINNER, a DRINK, a CUDDLE and some STROKING or do they just lay out the HUMPING from the word go?

How many people will put out SEX before they've even gone for their first DATE?

And how many guys actually do manage to find CLITORIS?

Oh my. Oh God. I love Scrabble. The versatility. The contortions. The tension. Anything is possible.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can't say I've played scrabble much Maria though strip scrabble sounds entertaining with the right crowd. I've played strip chess though - actually chess has a surprisingly murky history, especially at the world championship level: there was the controversy where a player was accused by his opponent of receiving tips in his yogurt cartons during a game - the fact he ate twenty odd cartons during a six-hour game got a little suspicious. But I most like the tale of the match between Karpov and Korchnoi where a metal barrier had to be placed under the table to stop the players kicking each other!

Maria said...

Apache, when you say "yoghurt" and "chess" to me, you've taken strip chess to a whole new level. Yum.

Say chocolate sauce and Scrabble to me ... mmmm ...

Friendless said...

I've put quite a bit of thought into the rules for Strip Scrabble, and while your suggestion sounds good for a 4 player game, if I tried to use those rules for a 2 player game it would devolve into an orgy fairly quickly. My best idea is that you choose some number of points (e.g. 20, 25) and every time you make a word worth that many points your opponent has to take something off. Once your opponent is naked, further good scores give you extended privileges which I won't go into here.

That's a damned fine photo, where did you find it?