There are so many reasons to love the game of Scrabble, most of which will be familiar to players of any experience level. You might love word games or classic games in general. Maybe you grew up playing with your family, and it holds a special place in your heart. Finally, you might enjoy the game’s unique blend of language, mathematics, geometry, and probability.
Whatever your reasons are for loving Scrabble, there’s no right or wrong. I love hearing stories about how people came to fall in love with the game (here’s mine: link). However, in my experience as a competitive Scrabble player for over a decade, I’ve realized that there are even more reasons to love the game than you might expect. Here are three reasons to love Scrabble that you may not have considered before.
1. EVERY GAME BECOMES UNIQUE NEARLY INSTANTLY
In Scrabble, every game involves finding words from a rack of tiles. And there are principles that you can learn that apply to almost every game. First, use your high-scoring letters to score a lot of points. Second, try to reach the most valuable bonus squares on the board when you can. Third, find bingos (words that use all 7 of your tiles) to earn 50 bonus points. Finally, look at the tiles yet to be played to guide your choices towards the end of a game.
I love Scrabble because while many of its foundational concepts are consistent from game to game, the way each game plays out is a complete surprise. Because of the sheer number of words in the dictionary, Scrabble games typically become unique after just two moves. That means the game you’ve just started is different from any game of Scrabble that’s been played before. So if you’ve ever enjoyed a game at first only to become bored with repetitive gameplay over time, rest assured: this will never happen to you with Scrabble.
Every game holds the promise of an exciting word you’ve never played, a rarely-seen strategic situation, or an electrifying conclusion. In chess, games between elite players often take between 10 and 20 moves to reach a novel position. Scrabble reaches novelty significantly earlier, no matter the skill level of the players involved in the game.
2. SCRABBLE SATISFIES OUR IMPULSE TO COLLECT
As a child, I loved collecting things. Not long after I learned to walk, I developed a passion for collecting sticks and lining them up in rows. Pictures of me as a toddler often reveal a bundle of sticks laid neatly on the ground nearby or collected in my closed hand, ready for arrangement. As I grew older, I began to collect sports cards, then Marvel, Magic: The Gathering, and Star Wars card sets. I loved the feeling of acquiring a new card. Sometimes, if I was dedicated enough, I could assemble a full set. I remember proudly beholding a season’s worth of basketball or football cards formed after months of effort.
I also loved video games with collection mechanics, including Pokemon, the Final Fantasy series, the Grand Theft Auto series, and several classic Nintendo franchises, like Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario 64. There’s something deeply satisfying about collecting everything a great game has to offer, spanning the journey from zero to 100 percent over time.
For me, the Scrabble dictionary holds this very same allure. In Scrabble, you can think of the words you know in the dictionary as part of a huge collection, just waiting for you to add more. Of course, it’s already a lot of fun to learn a new word. Learning about an object or concept you’ve never heard of before expands your knowledge of the world and broadens your horizons. But as a Scrabble player, adding words to your ‘collection’ will improve your experience as a player and make the game even more interesting. Not to mention you’ll find yourself finally defeating that relative or friend who you just can’t seem to beat.
It can be daunting at first. The dictionary is huge. Even though you’d be surprised how many words in the dictionary you already know, there’s still a lot of words you’ve probably never seen before. But once you’ve started on your journey of learning more words, it starts to be a lot of fun to continue onward. For more information on how I “collect” new words into my Scrabble vocabulary, I made a video on the topic you might find helpful here: YouTube Video
3. SCRABBLE HAS LONGEVITY
As I just mentioned, I grew up playing video games. I remember playing certain games avidly for long periods before moving on to the next big game to be released. Now and then, you might come across a video game so well designed that it retains its freshness for decades into the future. But most video games, even the most popular ones in their eras, eventually fade into memory after enough time passes.
Scrabble, on the other hand, has been around for over 80 years. It’s been a popular, universally recognized board game for the vast majority of that time. According to a theory known as the Lindy Effect, the future life expectancy of non-perishable items like technology or ideas can be measured by how long those items have already existed. In other words, if an idea or a game has been around for an extremely long time, the odds are very good that it will continue to be around for an extremely long time into the future.
By this principle, chess, which is over 1,500 years old, has perhaps the longest life expectancy of any game apart from backgammon or go. On the other hand, Scrabble is a game with impressive longevity of its own compared to almost any other game outside of these other classics.
As a gamer at heart, something I love about Scrabble is that my investment of time and energy in the game is very likely to pay dividends for me throughout the rest of my life. I can’t say that about very many other games I’ve played. Most of the video games I’ve played have receded into the past. Now and then, I boot up a classic game that used to be a favorite. I’m usually mystified as to how I ever felt the game to be cutting-edge.
Scrabble’s appeal goes beyond graphics and derives primarily from its elegant, simplistic design combined with nearly limitless complexity. Because Scrabble has already proven itself to have staying power, the odds of the game persisting long into the future are nearly assured. And when you’re picking a game to play more often, take more seriously, or even fall in love with, isn’t that comforting to think about?