Games Ghulfdom Plays

Our favorite and enduring word game is My Word—actually myword! in its original formulation by its maker, Gamut of Games, Inc., once at 1133 Broadway, New York, NY 10010. Not that we noticed that address in the early 1970s when we bought the game—but a double-thirteen is surely a mark of distinction. It was a word-guessing game played on a sheet, and permitted the guessing of either 6- or 7-letter words. Herewith a scan of the original My Word sheet:

Click to enlarge; Esc returns.

This looks like Brigitte’s sheet in a game between the two of us. She gave me the six-letter word BLITHE and the seven-letter DEADPAN. I gave her DELUGE and BLUSTER. The penciled-in scoring of successive guesses is explained thus:

·         Any letter in the guess also present in the target, but out of position, gets 250.

·         Any letter in the guess which is present, and also in position, gets 1,000.

·         If none of the letters is present, the score is zero.

·         All letter-scores are added and the sum is then given to the player who gave the guess-word.

In the bottom left panel, Brigitte’s test-word, FOUL two letters were absent (FO)—0, the U was there and in position—1,000, and the L was present but out of position—250. Add the results and the score for the guess-word is 1,250. As shown on the graphic, each player does his/her guessing at the bottom and records the opponent’s guesses on the top, alongside the scores that they merit. An alphabet to the side permits recording the elimination of a letter.

Early on we could still buy pads of answer sheets. But as our fascination with the game grew, so the game’s popularity evidently faded. Gamut of Games applied for its trademark on May 24, 1972—thus forty years ago. The trademark became deactivated April 5, 1982. But we had, by then, shifted from playing on preprinted sheets to those we made ourselves. And the moment we began to type or draw our own sheets, the game also expanded. We soon had 8- later 9-letter word sheets. Our most recent innovation was to create a form on which any word, up to 11-letters may be played. It also includes additional features that help in keeping track of things.

Our game yesterday included one hard-fought exchange in which Brigitte gave me PAMPHLETEER and I gave her CIRCUMSPECT. Forty years and still at it—and the game is popular across the family.

Oh, and by the way: There is a version of it that has actually made it into the cyberage. It is called What’s my Word? It runs on the iPad and the iPhone. Same scoring conventions but a simpler pattern; and evidently you can only play six-letter words. No, that was not a sneer. But we only play 6-letter games as a kind of warm-up.

Our Games Teach Us Pop Culture

We were playing Bananagrams again. I was finished with a perfectly square 10 x 10 structure requiring only the placement of a Z. After long staring I finally put it in. The partial image here shows where I put it. The top horizontal is PROKARYOTS, the left vertical is POTENTIALS, the middle word is TACHOMETER. The CHE is, of course, the first name of someone called Guevara.

I showed the puzzle to Brigitte, who is a quick study, mind, and instantly she said “RZA? What is that? OZ I recognize as the Wizard, but RZA?” — “That’s RCA as they might write it in Russia,” I said, both laughing and blushing a little.

It’s just a game…

But then, later, I went down to see if there is an abbreviation like that, something that isn’t all that obscure. Googled RZA. Well! You learn something every day. The very first item Google presented was a Wikipedia article (here) on Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, described as “an American Grammy-winning music producer, author, rapper, and occasional actor, director, and screenwriter.” It turns out that RZA is his stage name. Our Bananagrams rules are that the word must be in the dictionary or be notable in the culture so that one can readily write a clue for it, as in a crossword puzzle. The clue for RZA is therefore “Stage name of Rapper Robert Diggs.”

It’s just a deadly serious and tense game around here, each of us peering over ramparts of dictionaries…

Bananagrams

One of Monique and John’s Christmas gifts to us was Bananagrams, a Scrabble-like word game—and in selecting this item they once more proved that often it’s the small gifts (this one around $15) that bring the most lasting pleasures to the recipients. Ever since the 1960s, our whole family has been much devoted to My Word, a word-guessing game played on paper. Over the decades we’ve expanded, indeed much improved the game. We have versions where one can guess eleven-letter words. Brigitte and I also go through crossword puzzle phases—printing out three at a time from various sources and then solving them, usually in the summer, out back in the shade of the umbrellas. We’ve also made crossword puzzles—of which the most famed was one New York Times-style Sunday crossword puzzle prepared for the occasion of my Mother’s eightieth birthday. Bananagrams fits right into this matrix. The game offers a puzzle, a creative challenge—and you can easily play a round over lunch, for instances, without taking too much time.

The game consists of 144 tiles with letters. Fifty-four are vowels, E having the greatest frequency (18). J, K, Q, X, and Z are minorities; they appear only twice. The mission of the game is to use all letters the player receives in a crossword or Scrabble-like formation.

We’ve devised our own version with our own rules for measuring excellence. We divide the tiles in half and then we use our 72 tiles to make a puzzle. The result is judged by the density of the structure—the smallest possible square or rectangle—and by the average length of the words: the higher the average, the better the score. Here is the winner from yesterday’s game, laid by Brigitte.

This layout turns out to fit into an 11 x 11 square, thus 72 tiles occupying an area of 121. Seventy-two, of course, is the virtually unreachable perfection—no blanks at all. Next we calculate the average word-length, done by counting the total words (22), the tiles they use (107), and dividing tiles by words. Here the result is 4.864 (best to use three decimals). Believe me, that’s a pretty high score. This puzzle has one 10, two 9s, one 8, one 7, and three 6-letter words. That’s as far as we’ve come in developing a scoring system.

We permit any formation spelled correctly, including abbreviations that might appear in crossword puzzles. You might take exception to YA in the lower right, but a crossword creator would clue that as: “Fully grown person but not yet middle-aged (abr.)” And yes, I noticed. Troglodyte is misspelled. But that could be fixed. Challenge to the reader: How would you do it? By the way, it can be done while still staying within the 11x11 square, the word-count would remain the same, and the unsightly doubling of AXIS would also be fixed.

Abraham Nathanson created Bananagrams and introduced it in 2006—thus virtually yesterday. Nathanson passed away at age 80 in 2008. He was a graphics designer. Thanks, Abraham. Nice contribution to the peace of the world.