Scrabble

My roommates and I occasionally played Scrabble during college, but it wasn't until I had an almost-daily standing lunchtime game with my coworkers at an investment company that I appreciated the intricacies of the game. It's not always about making your best play; sometimes it's about saving a few good letters and waiting for a bingo (a turn that uses all seven of your tiles, which earns 50 extra points). Sometimes, too, it's worth trying out a word that looks real but might not be: Your competitors risk losing a turn if they challenge you.

It's often advantageous to play parallel to a word that's already on the board, rather than one that's perpendicular to it, since you get points for all the words that you create each turn. Therefore, it's essential to know all the acceptable two-letter words. They're not that hard to learn:

• Many of them you already know.
• No two-letter words contain C, Q, V, or Z.
• All English, Greek, and Hebrew letters can be spelled out and used as words (and pluralized), and the spellings aren't hard to commit to memory: AR, EF, EL, EM, EN, ES, EX, KA, MU, NU, PE, PI, and XI.
• All the solfege syllables (DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, TI, SI) and their plurals are allowable. Related is UT, another music term.
• Remember the two-vowel twos: AA, AE, AI, and OE.
• Remember the two-consonant twos: HM, MM, and SH. (There are a bunch of good three-consonant threes, too, such as HMM, BRR, and the odd-looking CWM.)
• Foreign currencies and units of measure - LI and XU are the twos - are allowable.
• Common expressions are good: AH, AW, EH, ER, LO, OH, OW, OY, UH, UM, YA, and YO.
• Remember the liberal B, H, and M: Any vowel except U can follow these letters. (MU is a word, but we've already covered that.)
• Now there are just a few not-so-obvious ones that must be memorized: AB, AG, AL, AY, DE, ED, ET, ID, NA, NE, OD, OM, OP, OS, TA, UN, WO, and YE. And the J-savior: JO.

The other essential words to learn are the Q words that don't require a U. These are QAT, QAID, QOPH, FAQIR, QANAT, TRANQ, QINDAR, QINTAR, and QWERTY; you can tack on an S at the end of each of these. And then there are the un-S-able words: SHEQEL, QINDARKA, and SHEQALIM.

Other tips can be found at www.scrabble.com.

In our lunchtime games, we played with the replace-the-blank variation: If there's a blank on the board and you have the letter that replaces it, you can, when it's your turn, put the letter down and take the blank for use in that turn or a subsequent turn. That rule allowed me to make my highest-scoring play: QUEEREST covering two triple word scores, for 203 points.

We also found an on-line unscrambler, which lets you type a bunch of letters in and will come up with all the words of any length that can be made with those letters. We allowed players to use the unscrambler for one turn per game, with a 10-point penalty.

It took a while for us to realize the value of confidently putting down a word that we were pretty sure wasn't legal, or trying out a word that we really had no idea about. I was never good at the former, since I couldn't keep a straight face. That was John's specialty: He was quite convincing, and I didn't challenge, when he plunked down GIRANT. But I was OK (remember that "OK" is not a word) at the latter, tentatively forming ESPECIAL for a (challenged) bingo, and getting away with HEXT, which looks allowable when you know that HEX, SEXT, and VEXT are kosher. And it's perhaps fitting that I won our last office game with the word WON, connecting with AZO (a good Z-dumper, along with its anagram, ZOA) and correctly banking on the acceptability of AZON.