There’s a word for the Scrabble players who win without style

This week a Scrabble championship in France was won by a magnificently bearded man call Nigel Richards. He’s not actually from France, but New Zealand, and he doesn’t speak French at all. His tactic to secure victory was simply to learn all the acceptable French words allowed in the game’s rulebook.

Now while Mr Richards certainly earns my respect for his achievement, the heart does sink rather at his bald, joyless drive to crush his opponents. Everyone likes to win at Scrabble – my parents have a ledger of every single battle-score going back years – but the principal pleasure of playing is surely the discovery of an elegant little word on your rack; or of squeezing in a word that snuggles three letters up to another; or of finding the greatest heartskipper of all, the holy grail of Scrabble, the Seven Letter Word.

The winning board of the World Scrabble championship last year had the words DIORITE, GLEET and UMU on it. (Yes, it was in English.) Now while it was no doubt nice to score 69 for the first of these, it is highly questionable that the player knew the meaning of the word (it’s an “igneous rock”). Or that an umu is a Maori oven. These words are the ringers of the Scrabble world, deployed purely in order to win – destroying the true fun of the game. The real delight can come simply by adding a G to HUN as the tail end of the word PRANG. Or to nestle HON and AWE together to produce HA, OW and NE. These certainly won’t be high-scorers, but they score high in pleasure.

The beauty of Scrabble is that no game is ever the same. Not even similar. The infinite number of possible board results makes each as fresh and unpredictable as the last. It could be a frustratingly tight board, with small words bundled, squashed and breathless, into a corner; a “staircase” game, where steps of words climb from the bottom left corner to the top right with impossible-to-expand letters such as C, Q and J blocking any growth westwards; or a wonderfully breezy open board, with sixand seven-letter words stretching out, willing new words to come and join them.

The professional amateur (as we all think we are) will vary in their tactics. I starting playing the game with my father as a boy, and today, decades later, we two continue to spend many hours discussing the minutiae of gameplay with one another. Somehow, an element of morality even creeps in to our discussions, as though one method is somehow more virtuous than another.

Of course, we are both still seeking victory – but the capricious journey to achieve it is the real reason we play. I, for example, pride myself on highscoring “tinies”: the QI or JO sneaked on to a Triple Word score. Others, I know, just like the words themselves regardless of score, and delightedly place NITTY or HONIED on the board, unfazed by the meagre haul of points the words bring.

My father disdains both approaches. For he is a seven-letter obsessive, one of that smug band of players who care more about the slam dunk, clean sweep of the tile rack, than the 50point bonus. Whichever way, it is the sheer enlightening adventure of wordplay that we treasure. Mr Richards’s rote-learnt triumph, by contrast, seems to dispense with that linguistic relish. He’s missing the point.

Winning for winning’s sake? It’s just not BRITISH (a mere 12 points).