Due to holidayness we have failed to play enough games to do all the reviews! My sister’s gone wandering across Europe and I’m about to go wandering across Wales. So I must apologise that we will not be able to publish our reviews as promised in the June Update post. But we will review Trivial Pursuitand Know it All in July; as well as the Kids Games month we had planned. But until early-mid July it’s unlikely we’ll achieve anything.
I take great solace in the fact that I doubt anyone really cares but great pride in the fact that probably more anyones care than those that would have cared around 5 months ago!
Anywa;y I hope you all have wonderful holidays planned, with plenty of games and craziness! So this is goodbye for at least two weeks or so… Hopefully less, but I make no promises.
Taboois an absolutely hilarious game, even more so when you play with people you know really well. It’s only kind of a quiz game, in that it’s not actually about how much stuff you know, it’s about your ability to describe.
What’s In The Box:
The Stuff.
1 Rulebook
1 Taboo Easel
1 Really Annoying “Nuh-Uh” Button
1 Score Pad
2 Reversible Word Decks
1 Timer
1 Pencil
1 Die
Playing The Game:
Objective: To get more points than your opponent by accurately describing more words to your team.
This game’s pretty simple, essentially you just divide up into teams, and then take it in turns to do some describing. You choose one player from your team to describe, and one to guess. The describer then places one card up on the easel, like this:
This is how you put the cards you’re describing.
As you can see, there are four colours on each card, which is great, is allows you to play four different games, and the colours have different kinds of words on them. We were playing to describe the green words, so the deck is placed accordingly face-down inside the easel and only one card at a time is revealed. Once the top card is turned up it’s the job of the describer to describe the word in such a way that their partner can guess it. BUT, they aren’t allowed to say the word on the card, or any of the words underneath it. These are “Taboo” words, and saying any of these causes you to give away a point to your opponents, as does passing because of the difficulty of a word to describe. They’re also not allowed to say the letter that the word begins with, or make explicit gestures.
Whilst you’re doing this you sit with one of the players from the other team; they’re given the annoying “Nuh-Uh” button and if you say anything you shouldn’t, they hit it so everyone knows you’ve made a mistake. For every word your partner guesses correctly, you get one point. Every time you finish a word, either because it’s been correctly guessed, passed or you said a Taboo word, you then flip up another card, trying to get through as many as possible per turn. The timer is used to regulate turns, each team is only allowed to turn it over once per turn and when it runs out your turn is over.
There is a second, slightly different version of this game, wherein the die is used. The only difference this makes is that at the start of each turn the describer has to roll the die, and then slightly different conditions apply. For instance, this side of the die means that the player describing must sit still like a statue:
Sit on your hands! (I also appreciate that the quality of this photo is terrible – Dave’s away so these photos were done on my phone)
The die does make the game slightly more interesting, but can be frustrating if you continually forget to roll or only get that face showing…
Winning The Game:
Points are scored how I said above, players pre-determine how many rounds or sections of the deck are going to be played before play starts. Once that number of cards has run out, the game is over, and the winner is the team left with the most points!
Strategy:
I can’t really figure one for this game, don’t waste your time waving your arms around? Try and partner up with someone who thinks similarly to you, sometimes you get a word that you can make an obscure film or song reference to, to help your partner guess it. But that’s no help if they’ve no idea what you’re on about!
History and Interesting Things:
There was a game show based on Taboo, hosted by Chris Wylde, in 2002.
In 2010, Cassandra Dominguez scored a record of 38 points in a four-round game at the World Board Gamers Convention.
The buzzer for the game featured on the Special Project episode of The Office.
Originally there was a board with the game, like in Tension, but this is no longer in the current editions of the game.
As far as history goes, that’s about it, it was only published in 1989, so not very long ago. It’s been on the radio and appeared in a few different TV shows, but other than that it’s not got much to say for itself.
To Conclude:
Taboo is a great game, a lot of fun, very light hearted and generally very silly. Like most games, it’s more fun with more people. Also, the fact that the rules explicitly say that you’re allowed to burst into song to help your partner guess a word really appeals to our family.
Tension is an interesting game, in the sense that it says; “NO! Not all answers to this question are right… Only the ones that I randomly preordain as right will score you points”. So. You end up getting angry at it because you name every James Bond film except for the ones written on the card.
What’s In The Box:
The Stuff!
The game board.
1 Orange and 1 Purple deck of Quiz cards.
Pad of scoring sheets.
Two playing pieces.
Sand timer.
Rules book.
Two pencils.
Playing The Game:
Objective: To be the first player/team to reach the ‘Tension’ marker in the middle of the board.
The starting setup.
Each player/team places their piece at the start, then the opposite team draws a card of choice (either purple or orange). They write the title of the card on their score sheet (you are effectively keeping score for the other team). Then they read out the title of the card and flip the timer over. The other team has until the timer runs out to guess as many of the ten things written on that card, that fall into that category – for example “James bond Films”, “Madonna Hits” or “British Inventions” – as possible. The team who reads the card out ticks off each one they get right on the score card until the time is up. The team then gets to moves the amount of spaces they got right. The colour of the square they are now on dictates the colour of the next card that will be drawn for them. They then do the same
for the other team.
The additional factors are the question mark squares and the whirlpool squares:
Question mark squares – The player must guess how many answers they are going to get right before the title of the card is read. If they get at least that many right they may move the amount the guessed (and no more) forward, if they get less than what they guessed they have to move the amount they guessed backwards. The colour of the card they get for these squares is chosen by the other team.
Whirlpool squares – If you land on one of these at the end of your move, the move you just made is immediately made again e.g. if you moved 7 and ended on a whirlpool you get to move 7 again straight away.
The player to reach the middle of the board first wins!
Strategy:
Possible strategy to this game is limited but here are a few things:
BE REALLY SMART OR PICK THE SMART PERSON TO BE ON YOUR TEAM – Basically knowing a lot about a lot of things is helpful… As in all quiz games.
TACTICALLY TRY TO HIT WHIRLPOOLS – If you can think fast enough you can try to hit Whirlpools intentionally. For example if you know you need eight to land on one, stop guessing once you know you’ve got eight right, because they you’ll move sixteen over all.
TACTICALLY TRY TO MISS QUESTION MARKS – Try to miss question marks by making sure you get more or less than the amount needed to land on one.
History and Interesting Things:
There is almost no history to be found on this game except that there are two editions of the game; the first one published in 1992 as Tension: The Crazy Naming Game and the second edition published more recently as Tension:The Zany Crazy Naming game, this is the edition we have which has more up to date topics/answers than the original.
To Conclude:
This could be a very good game; it’s easy to see how the concept could be expanded to make it more of a board game as well. You could add more of a maze type board and directional options that allow you to choose between which type of cards you’re more likely to get given. This would make it less based on just knowing stuff – yeah I know it’s a quiz game, but it could be that and so much more. Also some of the cards are a bit questionable as to who could possible guess those 10 answers correctly, like this one:
The one that can’t be read because of the flash is “Swiss Cheese”.
Not only is the question so broad it literally has millions of answers but the 10 answers picked to be “the chosen few” are mostly ridiculous! If the questions where a little better devised and the general game design a little more complex it could be a very good game. Additionally I see no real reason why it needs to be only two players/teams, apart from the fact that the teams/players who aren’t guessing or reading are sitting around doing nothing… But that’s true of most board games ever… If it’s not your turn, you’re not doing anything.
It does have the advantage that it’s easy to play, quite quick, and a good laugh, so it’s not all bad… It could just be so much better!
So on Saturday the 31st of May we went to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham. It was amazing! We’d been debating about going for all three days, but decided to go just for the day as we were unsure if it would be worth it or not. On reflection we can say it’s definitely worth going for the full thing and we will be going for all three days next year! Anyway, being the proud owners of a video camera we took that with us and videoed some bits; here’s what happened:
Because it was in Birmingham it was a LONG day; we left our house in London at 5am and got home at 11pm, give or take a bit, and all that for only six hours or so at the Expo.
The Biggest Problem With The Expo Was Staying Rich!
All the things we bought! And the programs.
We bought three board games, some surplus canvas boards that looked cool and a whole load of games pieces. Now that may not seem like much but actually that was about £100 worth of stuff… Totally worth it. Especially as all the games are AMAZING! The Firefly game is quickly becoming my new favorite game!
Chris Barrie Was There:
As you may have noticed from the video (if you watched it) Chris Barrie was there, who is famous for portraying this man/hologram:
So that was really cool as I’m a HUGE Red Dwarffan!
What I Realised…
…Was that there are WAY more people into board games than I thought. There’s a lot of people doing really cool stuff and developing really really cool games. Like the Ragnar Brothers who are in the throes of developing a really cool looking card game called Steam Donkey, having had a little help from Kickstarter. That will definitely be a game we’ll be getting and reviewing once its released.
To Conclude:
The Games Expo was AMAZING and we’re definitely going back next year. Also if you live in the UK and like that kind of think I can’t recommend it enough.
It’s completely possible, and quite likely, that the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing the word Mastermindis the TV Quiz Show, and although there is a board game of this, this is not it. This game of Mastermind pre-dates the TV show (by 1 year) and is a very simple, quick and fun game that anyone can pick up. But I want it noted here that the version featuring in our photos is in fact the Junior Mastermind, version of the game produced for children, featuring small, brightly coloured jungle animals as the pieces and having only three holes across for the code, rather than 4.
What’s In The Box:
You can probably tell that we’re missing some of the pieces…
Green jungle playing board
Rocky mountain section (used to hide the code)
An assortment of 6 coloured animals
15 red creatures and 15 white creatures (supposedly)
Playing The Game:
Objective: to crack your opponents code before you run out of pieces, or to create a code that your opponent cannot crack.
To start the game you choose one player to be the code-maker, and one to be the code-breaker; then you position the board accordingly. The code-maker then takes a minute or two to secretly decide what the code’s going to be and put the pegs (or in our case little animals) in the shielded section of the board. After this, play starts.
It’s now the job of the code-breaker to pick out pegs (or animals), and position them on their side of the board in the order that they think the code is. The code-maker then uses their red or white creatures to signal which, if any, of these guess are right. To be right a piece must have both the correct position in the code (i.e. central, left or right hand end, from the point of view of the code-maker) and be the right colour.
So the first turn of the game might look something like this:
And they’re all wrong
Play continues in this manner until the either the code is cracked, or you’ve played to the end of the board. Like this:
And Dave wins
Winning The Game:
Traditionally this game is played in rounds; the players decide before starting how many rounds are going to be played (always and even number) with the roles of code-maker and code-breaker alternating every round. The winner is the player with the most points at the end of this. Points are scored by the code-maker. S/he gets one point for each guess the code-breaker makes, and is given an extra point if the code-breaker doesn’t manage to accurately guess the entire code in their last move. Points are kept track of across the rounds and added up at the end.
Strategy:
For the Junior version of this game there isn’t a great deal of strategy required, but for the adult version (which has a four-peg code, rather than three, and one more option for indicating yes or no to part of a code) you can be a little more logical about it. Unless you’re a mathematician (which I’m definitely not, but the internet’s a wonderful place to learn things) you probably won’t be able to work out in your head the maths that accompanies this game, but the most important thing to remember is that duplicates are allowed in the code.
History and Interesting Things:
The modern game, played with pegs, closely resembles a pen and paper game called Bulls and Cows that may be over a century old.
The rights to the game have been held by Invicta Plastics since 1971, initially they manufactured it themselves, but have since licensed it to Hasbro, Pressman Toys and Orda Industries for production across the world.
The 1973 edition of the game features a well-dressed white man sitting in the foreground with an attractive Asian woman standing behind him. Bill Woodward and Cecilia Fung reunited in 2003 after 30 years to pose for another publicity photo.
In a standard set of the game, allowing a four-peg code, with six colour options, there are 1,296 different possible code patterns (including, and allowing for duplicates).
In 1977 Donald Knuth showed that the code-breaker can solve in a maximum of five moves, using this algorithm.
There have been computer versions of the game produced, as well as multiple different editions released.
The difficulty level of the game is altered simply by changing the number of pegs allowed for the code, or the way in which the code-maker indicates a correct or incorrect guess.
To Conclude:
I like Mastermind a lot, it’s a simple game that’s good for burning time or just chilling out, it doesn’t require a lot of concentration, and it doesn’t take long to play. I’d strongly recommend teaching it to kids too, the length of time it takes to play is well-suited to the generally shorter attention span of kids. But don’t let the really little ones get their hands on it – swallowing one of those pieces could end really badly!
So this month is going to be Quiz Games (with the exception of the first game). I’m not a huge fan of Quiz Games because I consider myself a man who knows quite a lot about quite a lot of things… But just not any of the answers to any Quiz question asked EVER. I might see how it goes by keeping a tally of how many questions I collectively get right across the four Quiz games we do and publish it in the next Update post. Anyway, these are the games we’re doing:
We’re going on holiday! This coming month is when we’re both going on holiday; my sister is away for the best part of a month and I’m away for a few weeks in that time as well. So the posts that go up may be boring and short because we have no time. Additionally it’s possible something may be late or missed but, we’re trying to avoid that.
The board game cake my sister made for Scrabble went down quite well as a post, so we might try to do a board game cake a month starting from next month or whenever we have the time.
Time sucks! We have so many ideas and plans but NO TIME! Which I’m sure is a problem most people most places suffer from, but we’re working on cool things in regards to videos, our own game developments and just playing as many games as possible but unfortunately we’re doing them all so slowly it almost hurts. One day all cool things will surface!
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So to conclude classic games month we have Battleships… A game so iconic that they made a film out of it. A terrible, terrible film. Which is a shame, because the trailer made it look like it could have been quite good:
But if you haven’t seen it, really don’t! Any film starring Rihanna is probably going to be terrible and Taylor Kitsch doesn’t have the best track record either (although I maintain John Carter was nowhere near as bad as people said it was). Anyway I have already digressed severely, so to the point!
Two different ways to play battleships.
What’s In The Box:
Well we played this game the original way; which is on paper a bit like noughts and crosses (see the history section at the bottom for more info) and we played a newer version of the game that’s called Air Battle. So, for the paper one all you need is two pieces of paper, two pencils and a ruler/straight edge is handy, but not essential. But for Air Battle and most other variations of Battleships you will find these pieces (or similar).
The Stuff!
A box with two sides each with a grid on the divider and a grid on the bottom.
Five (amount may vary) battleships or similar craft.
A load of red pegs for marking hits
A load of white pegs for marking misses.
Playing The Game:
Objective: To sink all the other persons battleships by guessing correct grid co-ordinates until you’ve hit and sunk all their ships before they can do the same to you.
The game starts by by both player secretly placing their ships on there grid so only they can see.
The start of the game.
Each player then takes it in turns to guess the grid co-ordinates of the other persons ships; the other person must tell honestly if they have hit any of their ships. The player making the guess then records hits and misses on the grid that they have not placed their ships on so they can remember what they have and haven’t guessed. The other player also records where that player’s guessed if it’s a hit or a miss on the grid that they have placed there battleships on.
The red pegs mark hits and white pegs mark misses. The top grid shows your battleships and the hits and misses your opponent has made and the bottom grid shows the hits and misses you have made.
A player must announce when a ship is sunk and when all a players ships are sunk they’ve lost the game.
A finished game.
Strategy:
TO CLUSTER OR NOT TO CLUSTER… That is the question. Sometimes it pays off to cluster all your ships together, because then when one ship is sunk your opponent thinks that’s it for that section of the board and goes to guessing some place else. However, once they catch on that this is what you’ve done they very soon defeat you.
SEMI CLUSTER? – I find the best tactic is to put two of you ships together so it makes the shape of a one of the larger ships, that way at any point if you say sunk they think they’ve sunk a larger ship and stop bombing that area whilst really they’ve probably only sunk one of the two ships you put together.
READ HER POKER FACE – As always it pays to know they way your opponent thinks.
BE GOOD AT GAMES OF COMPLETE CHANCE – Because that’s really what this game comes down to.
History and Interesting Things:
The original game was developed as a pen and paper game (which is why we played it on paper too) and was sold by multiple companies in the 1930s.
It was released as a plastic board game by Milton Bradley in 1967.
The game is thought to have originated from the French game L’Attaque.
There is a Salvo variation to the rules that allows a player to call out 1 to 5 shots all at once to simulate the simultaneous discharge of guns.
It was one of the earliest games to be produced as a computer game. A version of it was released on a Z80 Compucolor in 1979.
That was then followed by Atari’s Battle Zone in the 1980s.
In 2010 an ‘updated’ version of the game was released which use hexagonal tiles and had islands on the board, also players could only place ships in their half of the board.
There are many, many variations of the game, including different sized grids versions, multiplayer versions, versions with submarines, versions with aircraft (like the one we played) and version with many different shaped craft.
There is a terrible film inspired by the game that came out in 2012… I know I’ve already mentioned it but if you doubt its terribleness watch this:
Obviously Battleships is iconic; its also good fun to play and takes next to no skill so anyone can do it. However it’s just a game of guessing, so gets easily boring and you can quite legitimately be beaten by a child at it… And that might tend to make you angry.
Because we live in a world where what your t-shirt says is an important personal statement about yourself we thought “Hey lets make some Tame the Board Game T-shirts”, so that’s exactly what we did. Also we’re going to the UK board games Expo(which we are very excited about) on the 31st of this month (May) and we thought they’d be good to wear there. So this is the finished product:
The front.The Back.The design.
Development:
So I first had the idea of a Ringmaster taming a wild board game ages ago when we first thought of making videos. My plan was to make it a really short opening animation to all of our videos (that’s still the plan, when we finally start rolling videos out). I had a picture in my head of a generic board game box with teeth, eyes and fur. It was semi inspired by The Monster Book of Monsters from Harry Potter. But then my sisters friend suggested doing separate monster items, like a monster card, a monster dice etc. But, not being naturally artistic, I need something to work from, as I have no concept of proportion and perspective, so I asked my Dad (who is quite artistic) to sketch me up some basic ideas and this is what he came up with:
The Ringmaster.The Monsters.
So with the help of a graphics tablet and some MAD tracing skills I made those into this:
The computerised end product.
Added some text and put it into a T-Shirt design website so it looked like this:
How the T-Shirt design program said it would look.
Added out moto and web address to the back like this:
The back.
And then sent them to print and we received the wonderful finished articles you see at the top of the post.
Future Plans:
Now, as I already said, I’m planning to use the design as an animated opening to our videos, which should be cool and as I already have the beginning articles drawn up in Flash it shouldn’t even be hard. Additionally, if we ever manage to make this blog into a “brand” like quite a lot of other people have achieved we will sell the T-shirts. But I get the feeling that that day is a long way off, if it exists at all. Lastly I was thinking (thanks to a helpful suggestion by my sister) of making the Ringmaster into our logo by blacking it out and turning all the edges into gold, but I’ll have to test what that looks like.
Anyway, let us know what you think of the T-shirts, are you impressed? Or do you think they came out badly?
. . . 7 Hours Later We Have An Interesting-Looking Cake
A while ago Dave and I decided that it might be fun to branch out a little into Board Game-related other things, so behold, Scrabble-cake!
My first attempt at a Scrabble-cake. The next one’ll look less odd.
So anyone that knows me will know that I do a lot of baking, the weirder the cake, the better. A while ago I had an idea for a really cool cake to make Dave for his next birthday; unfortunately this idea came about three weeks after his most recent birthday. The only plus side is that I’ve now got the better part of a year in which to make it a few times and discover the most practical way to go about it. Which I didn’t have with this cake.
The idea for Board Game cakes came from a “hey, why don’t we choose a Board Game of the Year, at the end of every blog-year?” idea (different to calendar years, but similar to academic years because the blog started at some point last September). And turned into “I could totally make a cake that was the board of the game we choose!” Then, back at the end of March, it was my friend’s birthday, and her favourite game of all time is Scrabble, the official post for which is also now up.So I set myself the task of making her a Scrabble-cake.
The above photo is the end result of my first (and currently only) attempt at such a thing. The game represented there is one we’d actually played a week or so before. I do also realize that there’s some dubious words on there, as far as the real rules for Scrabble go. But we’ve always had a more flexible approach to it than most.
Things You Will Need/Whatever It Was I Used:
I made a fairly standard (albeit huge) chocolate cake for this, because a) chocolate cake is awesome and, b) I needed something relatively solid to squidge lots of icing onto.
The Cake Recipe:
This chocolate cake is amazing, super-simple, and takes next-to-no time to make, but I need you to keep in mind when looking at the amount of each ingredient you’ll need that I’m giving you the double-dose that I used for this cake, so it’ll turn out pretty big.
You will need:
250g Soft Butter
2 teaspoons of Vanilla Essence
550g Caster Sugar
4 Eggs
400g Self-Raising Flour
100g Cocoa Powder
320ml Water
Method (I love this method):
Combine all ingredients in a large bowl, beat on low speed with electric mixer (or on standard speed if doing this by hand) until all ingredients are combined. Increase speed to medium (or beat faster until your arm wants to fall off) for about three minutes or until the mixture is smooth and has changed to a lighter colour. Spread into a large square tin (pre-greased, of course). Bake on 180 degrees Celsius until cooked when poked. Stand the cake for five minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.
My favourite thing about this recipe is that the method essentially just tells you to bash everything together in a bowl, stick it in a tin, and shove it in the oven; after seeing so many complicated, lengthy cake recipes, this one makes me very happy.
Making the Scrabbly-Bit:
The Things I Used:
A large pack of roll-out white icing
2 thin bladed sharp knives
1 bottle of green food colouring
1 sterilized pin (but if you can get icing pens, or have a steady enough hand to substitute a clean paintbrush, I highly recommend it)
1 small paper square template
How I Went About It:
First, after the cake had cooled a bit (I didn’t let it cool completely, which I should’ve, because I’m impatient and wanted to get on with things), I completely covered it with a big square of the roll out icing, this was to provide a surface on which to recreate the Scrabble board, although it wasn’t as flat as I would’ve like. So your basic cake, before you start anything complicated, should look like this:
My Scrabble-cake-board
Making the tiles and putting letters on them was the hardest bit, and, on reflection, there were probably better ways to go about it. I briefly considered making all 100 Scrabble letter tiles, before realizing that we hadn’t used all 100 (although we weren’t far off it) in the game. So instead, I got up the photo of the game and counted how many tiles I needed. I then rolled out a whole kitchen-tables worth of icing, and started cutting out tiny squares. After many hours of painstakingly trying to keep the squares actually square as I cut them out, I’d achieved this:
My blank Scrabble tiles, not perfect, but not bad
The next step was to actually make them into letters; I did this by using a bowl of green food colouring (because we didn’t have any black or blue, and yellow and pink are crap colours for this kind of thing) and a pin. I used to tip of the pin to etch the letters and their point value into each tile, and then tipped the pin with food colouring, to make them visible. I decided the easiest way to prevent mistakes was to make the game one word at a time, starting from the top left-hand corner, which I did. This is the photo of the game that I was working from:
This game was played on our travel-Scrabble board, rather than the (much nicer) board, that features in our actual Scrabble post.
My recreation of this game looked like this (before I put it on the cake):
The game.
Now all that was left was for me to transfer this, to the cake. A part of me still thinks that this should’ve been a simple job, but because the cake wasn’t all that flat across the top, it became much harder than it initially appeared….
Initially, I moved the tiles onto the cake without fixing them down in any way to make sure they all fit, and to space them out properly. Prior to cutting out the tiles I had done the maths of measuring the width of the cake and then working out from that the dimensions that each tile needed to be, to ensure that I could fit them all on and keep it accurate to a real Scrabble board (albeit with a lot of artistic license), so I shouldn’t really have needed to put them on loose first, I could’ve just stuck them straight down. Buuuut, my maths skills are not the best; I have been known to not be able to count to five in the past, so I second-guessed myself, and made everything take that much longer by checking it was all okay.
After I’d done this I managed to convince myself that I had got it more or less right, and stuck the tiles down. For this I used jam of some description that I found in the fridge, warmed in the microwave. I spread a little of this on the back of each tile, and then fixed it to the cake. However, I warmed it slightly too much, and some of the tiles closer to the edges of the board started sliding, which was irritating, because I then had to hold them until the jam set a bit.
Once I’d got through this, the cake looked like this:
A somewhat jammy, almost finished cake!
Finishing The Cake!
I realize that at this point the cake still doesn’t look an awful lot like a Scrabble board, and in the finished photo, it doesn’t hugely either, because I took a lot of artistic license at this point, in the interest of being able to go to bed. My sister, Ruth, had suggested that using Magic Stars would be a really nice way of putting the double/triple word/letter scores onto the cake, without having to write anything onto it, so I did that. And that was all I did. After that I decided that the cake was finished, and went to bed.
Things I’ll Do Differently Next Time:
BUY ICING PENS. Seriously, these would’ve made my life much, much easier, using a pin to create the letter tiles was unbelievably awkward, and so easy to mess up.
Use sugar paste instead of jam to stick the tiles down, although I’d probably still have the problem of them sliding a bit, the stuff is at least the same colour as the icing, so the mistakes are less noticeable.
Try harder to make the cake come out flat/chop the lumpy bit off before starting to ice it. This would’ve made my life much easier if I had been working onto a flat surface, rather than one that was curved.
Draw on the board. Next time, I’m definitely going to draw out the actual Scrabble board onto the cake, and recreate a game onto that.
All that said, this cake was awesomely fun to make, and it was so big that Rachel and I managed to feed around 40 people with it! So I’m definitely doing this again. And there will also be more themed-cake posts in the future. If you try making this, please let me know how it turns out, and send photos, I’d love any kind of feedback!
Scrabble is one of the classics of classics. There’s a high chance that you’ve played this game at some point in your life, or, failing that, have seen a copy floating around in your grandparents house that they like to get out at Christmas and encourage everyone to play together. Either way, it’s a fun game to play, especially on teams, and especially especially if there are dyslexics around.
What’s In The Box:
The stuff.
1 Game Board
4 Tile Racks
1 Bag containing 100 Letter Tiles
1 Pencil and Score Sheet
The Chambers Dictionary (not actually included in the box, or used by anyone I’ve ever met when playing this game)
Playing The Game:
Objective: To have scored the most points by the time one player plays their last tile and there are none remaining in the draw bag.
To determine who plays first each player takes one tile at random from the draw bag, the player with the letter closest to the start of the alphabet is the starting player. From them play proceeds clockwise around the board. All of these tiles are then returned to the bag, and new tiles are drawn. In play order players draw 7 tiles and place them on their tile rack, keeping them out of the sight of the other players.
Once all players have their tiles, player one places a word on the board. All words must be at least two letters long and the first player places their first word across the red Double Word space in the middle of the board. After the first word has been played other players can lay words; new words must either be played through other words, crossword style, or be added on to the end of a word already on the board, for instance by adding an “S”. All words played must be real words, and names (of both places and people) and foreign languages are not considered legitimate words.
I don’t really know what was going on with this picture. I assume artistic license has something to do with it…
So you can kind of see what the opening words of a game might look like, even though the angle of that photo is weird as. Once a player has played a word, they then draw the same number of new tiles at random from the Draw Bag as they placed on the board. This can be interesting, because there’s no knowing which letters you’re going to be blessed with next. You can end up with a rack that only contains vowels, or consonants. Which is often not a huge amount of use.
However, there is a rule that allows a player to forfeit a turn to change all of their tiles, to do this the player must wait until it’s their turn, and then exchange their whole rack for fresh tiles from the Draw Bag. Play then immediately passes to the next player. This is a good rule that can allow you do something about getting rid of a rack that looks like this:
Had I chosen to do so, that rule would’ve allowed me to replace these tiles with new ones from the Draw Bag
Play continues in this way, with one player keeping track of score until one player plays their last tile after the Draw Bag has been emptied. To score a player has to take into account both the value of the letter tiles played (the number on the bottom right hand corner of the tile), and whether or not the word has been played over any double/triple word/letter score tiles on the board. If it has then you must increase the score of that word for that player accordingly. If a player plays a word that changes a word already on the board, for example playing a word that starts with “S” and adding the required S onto the end of a word already existing on the board, the player adds up to total for the word they have changed, as well as the word they played, to be the score for that turn.
A generally accepted method of keeping score is to draw out columns on your score sheet with the initial or name of each player at the top of a column, you then keep a running total going in the columns so you can see exactly where each player’s at throughout the game, like this:
Our score sheet. As per the norm, I lost.
Strategy:
The best kind of strategy for this game is to look out for the bonus point spaces on the board, because there’s no point in making an absolutely fantastic word that lets you play lots of your letters but doesn’t get you any extra points if it then creates easy access to a double/triple word/letter tile that another player can use to score some ridiculous amount of points. Other than that this is really a “be as imaginative as possible” kind of game, where the weirder the words you play are, the better the game gets.
History and Interesting Things:
The game was invented by an American out-of-work architect called Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938. He created the game by combining features of anagrams and crosswords.
It was originally called LEXIKO and then CRISS CROSS WORDS before becoming Scrabble.
Although everyone thinks of this game as a word game, it’s actually fundamentally a number game, to create the game a series of painstaking letter-frequency calculations were needed to determine how many times each letter should appear in the game.
The game was rejected by many games manufacturers, until Butts met James Brunot who loved the game.
Between Butts and Brunot they refined the rules of the game and came up with the name Scrabble which means “to grope frantically”.
The game was trade marked in 1948.
To produce the game the Brunot’s rented an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut, where, asissted by friends, they turned out 12 games an hour, stamping letters onto the wooden tiles one by one.
As with many games the game lost money in its first year, but, over a few years, the game steadily grew in popularity, until the president of MACYS came across the game on holiday and ordered some for his store. Soon after this it became a must-have, and Brunot realized that they could no longer produce the games fast enough to meet demand. They licensed Selchow & Righter to produce the game until, in 1972, they purchased the trademark from Brunot.
Selchow & Righter were bought by COLECO in 1986, but when they declared bankruptcy in 1989 the trademark was bought by Hasbro, the largest games manufacturer in America.
The game is now found in one in every three American houses.
To Conclude:
A very good game, although only rated 3 out of 5, this isn’t a reflection on how much I like the game, more of a reflection on how accessible it is for everyone. For instance, although it’s a great game for everyone in that it can be very fun and silly, it’s an unbelievably challenging game for anyone with literacy difficulties, as well as occasionally being very frustrating due to the random selection of tiles. That said, it’s a game everyone should play a few times, even if it’s just to discover that your friends know words that they didn’t know they knew so you can argue over whether or not they’re allowed on the board.
Tame The Board Game 