Years ago I was at a friend's house, where my college-age niece Felicity (Brown) and her friend Nina (ASU) were playing a game of Scrabble with some friends. This was not ordinary Scrabble with a board and the interminable wait. They were playing Speed Scrabble, a fast paced, competitive take on the crossword concept.
It works like this: There's no board, only tiles. Every player takes seven tiles. They turn them over simultaneously, and try and complete a crossword using all seven letters. The first one who does shouts "Go!", and everyone has to take another tile. You can rearrange your crossword endlessly (in fact, it's mandatory, especially when you get a "J" or a "Z" at an inopportune time). The game demands a quick mind, a large and, at times, useless vocabulary, and the ability to think under stress. If you have 5 or more players, it's over in 3 minutes.
I have taken it upon myself to spread the word of this game to college campuses whenever I can. At a tech school, a player cried out, "I don't need to spell! This is hard!" She would have preferred the letters to be in Greek and to be composing formulae with them.
At this small, Catholic school, it seems to be a hit, though they sometimes exhibited a propensity to use words in Latin. Later on, one of the players greeted me on the sidewalk, "That was fun!" I told her, Great! Now spread the word throughout the dorms!"
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