Sunday, February 8, 2009

Cannibal Scrabble

I'm addicted to Cannibal Scrabble. I don't really like traditional Scrabble, but I play Cannibal Scrabble every day at lunch in the cafeteria if I have time. Here's how you play: Take all the Scrabble tiles, except the blank ones, and place them in the center, facedown. Players take turns flipping over a tile, going clockwise. If you see a Scrabble-legal word (so no proper names) that's at least 3 letters long, call it out first and you get to take it and place it in front of you, and then you flip the next letter. Words can be stolen (you can steal your own words or other people's) by adding letters to them, but you have to change the root - so "dog" can become "gods", but not "dogs" - and you have to use all the letters from the word being stolen. Once all the letters are flipped over and everyone agrees they don't see any more words, you total up the point values on the letters of your words, and the one with the most points wins. It took quite a while to get to the point where I would actually have a respectable number of words at the end, but now I'm hooked.