True story. While on vacation, Ann and I played a game of Scrabble. After we each took 6 turns and placed 14 tiles, the board looked as follows:

            G A G
        T H E N
      L O A M
    W A N D
  L I K E
B O N E
A R E
D E

Ann went first, placing GAG in the exact center of the board. Later, she also scored a triple word score, by placing a word that included the letter D in the lower left hand corner of the board. We each played one or more tiles on each of our 6 turns. Can you identify a possible sequence of plays? There may be more than one solution.

In case you are not familiar with North American Scrabble rules:
1) The games is played on a 15 by 15 board.
2) Once a letter is played, it cannot be moved or changed. It is like doing a crossword puzzle in ink, with no erasing or crossouts.
3) On any given turn, letters are placed on empty squares. The letters played in a turn must all be in a single row or column, and must be part of a single word (which may include tiles played on earlier turns). At least one of the tiles played must touch (horizontally or vertically) a tile that was played on an earlier turn.
4) At the end of the turn, all horizontal and vertically contiguous letters (two letters or longer) must form valid English Scrabble words. Types of words which cannot be used are abbreviations, slang, prefixes, suffixes, non-English words, words that require a hyphen or an apostrophe, and words that are spelled with a capital letter.
5) Ann and I use the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD, 1998 version). DE, for instance, is a two letter word in the dictionary meaning "of, from". Incredibly, OSPD includes 96 valid two-letter words.

Scrabble dictionaries are not composed of all English words - even those of seven letters or less. For instance, the word "ake", meaning ache, can be found in the 1997 Random House Unabridged Dictionary. Though the noun form of the word is marked as obsolete, the verb form is not, thus - if that English dictionary had been chosen instead of the so-called "Official Scrabble Players Dictionary" - ake could be a valid play. (As to the OSPD, I personally do not support it as 'official' due in part to its kowtowing to political correctness, nor as a 'dictionary' due to its lack of providing full definitions, pronunciations and etymologies of its included words. I can see it being an 'official' valid word list source in tournament play, but I would oppose it as a choice for home games.)

Nonetheless, LAKE and LIKE as Steve offered in the solution, are not required to be formed in one play. The following demonstrates a possible sequence that could have occurred between Ann and Steve:
    ANN [63]    STEVE [95]
(1) GAG         gEM
(2) THeN, an    LOAm, to, ha
(3) lAKE        WAnD, la, ton, had
(4) BONe        LIkE, lo, win, tone
(5) bA          winE
(6) baD         loRE, are, de

Posted by Dej Mar on 2012-06-08 01:30:50