Club seeks more members
Scrabble has been a popular board game in Whanganui for more than 20 years.
And a Scrabble club for keen players is held on Mondays every week at 1pm in the back room of the Gonville Library.
Players arrive 10 minutes before time and remove their coats, put down their bags and select a table with a favourite partner and get that famous board out.
Just before World War II, in 1938, American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko.
The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including The New York Times.
The new game, which he originally called “Criss-Crosswords”, added the 15×15 gameboard and the crosswords-tyle game play.
There is now an Official Scrabble Players Dictionary or OSPD — a dictionary developed for use in the game by speakers of American and Canadian variations of English.
The Whanganui players reckon Scrabble on Monday afternoons is a good way to start the week.
“We play for about three hours,” one regular club player said.
“No one gets tired and we don’t talk a lot because this is a game about thinking.”
The players were all looking forward to the National Scrabble Tournament to be held at the St John base in Tawa St on Labour Weekend — Saturday, October 20, and Sunday, October 21.
“It’s a very exciting two days,” one player confided.