Before there was Bananagrams, there was Word-Sport

In the past, I've proposed, half-seriously, the idea of a future where Bananagrams is played on a serious tournament level, like Scrabble or chess. But it turns out that the idea of something like a Speed Scrabble tournament was floated and promoted before Bananagrams was even invented.

First, the game: It's called Word-Sport. Word-Sport is basically Speed Scrabble with some modifications. It is played with the entire Scrabble tile set (including the blanks, which are excluded from Speed Scrabble as normally played). Word-Sport oddly doesn't require that you actually link all your words into a single grid. Instead, there is a scoring system that offers rewards for single grids, for never allowing your opponent to peel (more feasible when you are playing with the smaller Scrabble tile set), and for words 7 or more letters long.

Plans were in the works for a version of the Word-Sport game you could buy (including some optional wild tiles) and a computer version of the game, playable over the Internet (modelled after Literati and paralleling the Large Animal Games Flash version of Bananagrams).

An equally fascinating part of the Word-Sport web site is the page that describes the birth of indoor rowing races. (Imagine a treadmill race, but with rowing machines). I am not making these races up. Apparently indoor rowing races inspired and motivated the idea of Word-Sport tournaments, complete with timers and specially designed tables.

Exploring the Word-Sport web site is like peering into an alternate universe because I can totally imagine a world where Word-Sport took off, pre-empting Bananagrams entirely.

Online Speed Scrabble: a review

I discovered that there is a web site called Supernifty which has an online Speed Scrabble game that can be played for free. Naturally, I decided to try it.

To play, you have to go through a straightforward registration process which requires only an e-mail address, a password, and a nickname. Once you've logged in you are greeted by a listing of available games that you can join, or you can create your own game. The feature that I particularly like here is that you can give a name to your game by typing it into the blank before creating the game. In principle, this gives players the ability to set up games for different skill levels or with different rules. Or if someone wants to practice on their own, they could call their game "Solitaire Only."

The game is an implementation of the "Take Two" variant of Speed Scrabble: You start with seven tiles, and once someone has formed a valid grid, two more tiles appear on the top row of every player's board, and play advances to the next "round". There is some scoring system where you get credit every time you win a round. Whoever wins the tenth and final round wins the game (and gets a lot more points). Points are also based on how long your longest word is in each round, and on how competitive your opponent is.


Diligent readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of Speed Scrabble, but this online version does away with a few of the nuisances of the offline game: Starting with a small number of letters and no ability to dump tiles makes it hard or sometimes impossible to form a valid grid early in the game. If you encounter such a situation in Supernifty Speed Scrabble, you can just skip that round by pushing the "Give up on round" button to get two more letters. (At least you can do this when playing alone, I did not run into this situation when playing with other players.)

I was a little surprised at how often the initial set of letters could be formed into a grid of words, and I started to suspect that this was by design when I got letters that seemed to coax me into forming a symmetric grid for a couple of rounds (as shown). Whether or not this is built into the program is something that I can't tell yet...

The game is implemented in Javascript, rather than Flash, which may be the reason that the interface is more minimalist. I liked how smooth and clean it felt, and since many of the games I played were solitaire games, it was overall kind of a relaxing experience (except the few times that the timer started to run down and I had to franticly drag tiles around the board.) My only frustration with the interface was that it's not possible to select a rectangle of tiles (as in the electronic version of Bananagrams) and move it around. This sometimes leads to having to shift a bunch of words from one place to another, one tile at a time. Aside from that issue, it is otherwise an intuitive interface, so you can just start playing straight away. If you'd like a more detailed description, try the official description of Speed Scrabble.

There were only a few people drifting on and off the site while I was playing, and often I was the only player on the site at all. If I am interpreting the scoring system correctly, the list of high scores corroborates the idea that there are just a handful of hard-core players and some others who have played on many occasions. But the site just came online in August of 2009 and an iPhone client for the game has been recently released, so the number of players may be on the rise.

If you like online word games and you want to try something different, I can recommend Supernifty's version of Speed Scrabble.

Why Bananagrams is not Speed Scrabble

• Bananagrams tiles are of a nice, smooth plastic (purportedly, bakelite) -- easy to slide around the table -- and lack the hard corners of those hazardous Scrabble tiles.
  
• Speed Scrabble's letter distribution and number of tiles (100) was designed for Slow Scrabble (played on a board, with players taking turns... you may have heard of it). Bananagrams has 144 tiles and a clearly different distribution (which might have been optimized for Bananagrams). With more tiles, it can be played with more people.
  
• Consequently, Speed Scrabble players start with only seven tiles, which means that your initial grid will be at most a few words. In contrast, Bananagrams players can start with up to twenty-one letters, breaking the game into two distinct phases: 1) building of an initial grid, with lots of latitude as to how one builds this foundation, 2) the PEELing phase, in which one is constantly interrupted by the grabbing of letters, and the focus of which is more reconfiguring the grid.
  
• Speed Scrabble lacks the DUMP rule, meaning that if you wind up with a bad letter distribution while playing Speed Scrabble, there is nothing you can do.
  
• Bananagrams comes in a handy fabric banana. It is the Hitchhiker's game choice. It fits in your purse or backpack. Some people keep a set in their car for emergency Bananagrams sessions.
  
• Bananagrams is cheaper. Compare prices and see for yourself.