Scramble: Part word game, part scavenger hunt, part Easter egg hunt

If you travelled back in time to the 2010 ARGfest in Atlanta (a conference for Alternate Reality Game designers and fans), you could have played in an original mutated word game called Scramble, masterminded by ARG designer Brooke Thompson.

Large letters have been scattered around the park and it is your job to find one. Once you do, you've got to find enough other people who have found letters so that you can form a word... a real word... not just one of those made up ones... well, not unless you can convince the Word Master that it’s a real one. Once you've gathered a word, head to the Word Master. Simple, right?

Not so much! Like Scrabble, each letter is worth a certain number of points... do you keep that Z you found or trade it in for an E? How many words, real words, can you spell with your letters? How many little tasks you were able to compete on the way? And... how quickly did you get back to the Word Master? Oh yes! It’s a battle between time & creativity. And it’s up to you to win.

Further event details may be found here. The exact rules of the game are not specified, but given that it was an experimental game, I don't think they need to be. The essence of the idea is enough for anyone who wants to try this. It seems like it would be well-suited to a party or also in a classroom, as it is the kind of challenge that also has educational value and teaches kids how to work together and think creatively.

I'd probably modify the game to make it more Bananagrams-like, requiring each group to form a single grid, and getting points for each word that they also can find a physical example of. Even I would like to play in that game!

I found a blog posting from someone who played in this game who writes:

The game was called Scramble, and the letters were valued like Scrabble tiles, the goal being to grab a group of people and get good letters to maximize your Scrabble score with them. Given that you could get credit for multiple words with the same letters, I picked up pretty quickly that the thing to do was to get 4-5 people, nab some good letters, and make lots of anagrams. You also got a double score for taking a picture of your word with an example of the word. My team went for C-O-D-E-S (and coeds, decos, and edocs), got pictures for all our words, and totally stomped on the other team, who only had one word, even though it was longer.

High marks to that team for devising a winning strategy on the fly, though if I were Word Master, I would have given the thumbs-down to the dubious "decos" and the hideous "edocs". A few more words like that, and I might think this was part of the ARGHfest.

My first Q-without-U word and Academic Games

I once played a game called LinguiSHTIK in a competitive situation. The other players were clearly veterans, and I was the rookie. They must have decided among themselves that they were going to take advantage of the newcomer. A big part of LinguiSHTIK is placing constraints on the word to be formed (e.g., must be four letters long, must be a noun, must contain a certain letter) while moving cubes with letters on them into either the ALLOWED or FORBIDDEN areas of the board. The other players made the requirements that the word must contain a Q and must not contain a U. Then at some point, one of them decided to CHALLENGE WIN, essentially saying that it was possible to make a word from the ALLOWED letters that satisfied all of the constraints. Fortunately, I had already come up with a word spelled with a Q but without a U - something I remembered from browsing through the Q section of the dictionary: QOPH (the 19th letter of the Hebrew alphabet). Somehow, I had managed to get the letters I needed into the ALLOWED set. When everyone revealed their words, the other players were kind of irritated: they had both been thinking of QAID (which was presumably the accepted Q-without-U word in that group) and they had never heard of QOPH. They challenged my word, but fortunately the dictionary contained the word QOPH, and I was vindicated.

WFF 'N PROOF, the manufacturers of LinguiSHTIK, have produced many other games, all having the same parallel-universe board game feel, probably because most of them have educational value as their primary design goal. These games do a good job of challenging the player while being fun enough as a game to suck the player in. Equations: The Game of Creative Mathematics is similar to LinguiSHTIK in that players are setting constraints and trying to find a solution that meets them, but with numbers and mathematical operations instead of letters and words. WFF 'N PROOF cites research suggesting that students who sometimes get to play Equations in math class skip classes less often and are better at applying math concepts.

The even more interesting claim is that another game boosts I.Q. test scores:

The first studies published (in 1972) on the effects of resource allocation games involved I.Q. tests on groups of students playing WFF 'N PROOF: The Game of Modern Logic intensively for three weeks in summer school classes. The average increase in the non-verbal I.Q. scores was more than 20 points. Although researchers have questions about the sort of intelligence actually measured by such tests, it is clear that there was a dramatic improvement in the problem-solving skills utilized in such exercises.

Another game that seems really compelling to me is Queries 'N Theories: The Game of Science & Language. It's the closest thing I have ever seen to a code-cracking game. One player makes up a "language" (consisting of fundamental allowed sentences and rules for transforming those sentences to other sentences). It's a bit like Mastermind except that where Mastermind has one secret sequence of colored tokens that the player is trying to infer, Queries 'n Theories starts off with such a sequence (a "sentence") which the first player morphs according to his transformational rules (like, every instance of GREEN RED transforms to RED YELLOW GREEN) and then presents the result - a more complex sentence in the language - to the other players. The other players then try to figure out the principles of the language by proposing possible sentences which are then accepted or rejected by the player who made up the language.

Like most of the WFF 'N PROOF games, Queries 'n Theories can be scaled down in complexity for the younger part of its age range (only sentences of length four for 12-year-olds) or scaled up to challenge more experienced players (sentences of length thirteen!). The most appealing part about this game, to my mind, is that it teaches scientific thinking and inductive reasoning.


There are two organizations that allow students to play some of these games against each other in a regular tournament: The Academic Games League of America and National Academic Games.

You can buy these games directly from Wff 'n Proof.

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Further reading: My previous post on Q-without-U words and a reference to another game about logic, invented by Lewis Carroll.