A team from the Guyana Association of Scrabble Players (GASP), the game’s governing body, is currently working with the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports to launch the game competitively in secondary schools.
However, there is not enough manpower or resources to include primary schools in the programme as yet but president of the GASP Moen Gafoor says he is confident that it would be a success among the older pupils.
In order to make the game more attractive the association plans to obtain corporate sponsorship to offer prizes to winners at each level of competition. The president also observed that teachers and pupils will need training in order to play the game correctly.
Meanwhile, Gafoor urged the public to look out for the new venture which will help in the mental development of pupils and may improve upon the present state of literacy in Guyana.
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works (e.g. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) provide a list of permissible words.
According to online information, the name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and of Mattel elsewhere. Scrabble was a trademark of Murfett Regency in Australia, until 1993 when it was acquired by J. W. Spear & Sons (now a Mattel subsidiary). The game is also known as Literati, Alfapet, Funworder, Skip-A-Cross, Scramble, Spelofun, Palabras Cruzadas (“crossed words”) and Word for Word.
The game is sold in 121 countries in 29 different language versions and some one hundred and fifty million sets have been sold worldwide.
“If there hadn’t been any Depression in the Thirties there wouldn’t be any Scrabble,” according to Alfred Butts, the inventor of Scrabble who, incidentally, never made any money from what became one of the most successful board games of the twentieth century. Butts was an unemployed architect living in New York in the 30s when he began devising a word game using letters printed on small cardboard squares.
It is said that an expert Scrabble player can regularly score more than 400 points while it has been calculated that it’s theoretically possible to score as many as 4,153 points in a single game. This requires the use of words such as, benzoxycamphors, diazohydroxides, and oxyphenbutazone.
Scrabble in Hollywood
No longer limited to the parlors of the world, competitive Scrabble has now become a theme worthy of the silver screen and so far four movies have been made featuring players vying for the top spot in the World scrabble tournament – Word Wars, Scrabylon, Word Freak, and Your Word Against Mine.
The game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter’s frequency in standard English writing; commonly used letters such as E or O are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points.
The game also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no points value. The blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter, once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed.
The board is also marked with “premium” squares which multiply the number of points awarded: dark red “triple-word” squares, pink “double-word” squares, dark blue “triple-letter” squares, and light blue “double-letter” squares. The center square (H8) is often marked with a star or logo, and counts as a double-word square.
In scrabble each word has a meaning; in fact the game has a special scrabble dictionary that holds over 80,000 words and is continually growing in word capacity. More words are accepted in the British scrabble dictionary in comparison to the American scrabble dictionary.
Scrabble is a rather unusual game where words can be abbreviated, for example, za is the shortened form of pizza and it is acceptable in a standard game.
Guyana’s governing body of the game is the Guyana Association of Scrabble Players (GASP) which has been active for almost 14 years with some 40 members who regularly get together to take part in competitions or play amongst themselves.
Members usually get together on Thursday evening to play competitively against other players. President of the GASP, Gafoor says. He has played scrabble for five years but took part competitively for four.
He says he has learnt a lot about scrabble since he first started playing. At present he is one of the club’s younger members alongside Abigail McDonald and Leon Belony. His highest score is 672 which is ranked number four. James Krakowski is ranked at number three and Fred Collins number 2. Abigail McDonald took the top spot after winning the national scrabble championships held a few weeks ago.
Most members in the association, however, are over fifty and have played scrabble since the early days when the association was newly-formed.
“Scrabble is thought of as an old people sport so with us starting our school programme we hope to attract the youngsters,” Gafoor remarked.
