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.
