how to play anagrams

You turn all the tiles from a Scrabble bag upside down on the table, minus the blanks. You turn up one tile each in rapid succession, and everyone scans all the upright tiles for words of four letters or more. If you find one, you call it out and take the letters, and form the word flat on the table in front of you. Everyone keeps turning up new letters and snatching words.

Here’s the tricky bit: if you can make an anagram of a word somebody else has snatched, you can steal it from them. You can also steal a word if you can make an anagram of a pre-existing word by adding new upturned tiles. You can’t steal a word by adding an ‘s’, and you can’t form an original word that is a plural, but you can steal a word with an ‘s’ in it by forming an anagram that is a plural. You can also take new upturned letters to make anagrams of your own words—because if you don’t, somebody else will.

So this is how it works out: when somebody finds a word, they immediately yell out every anagram of it they can think of, often including several words that do not exist. e.g. “Atom! Moat! Um… Amot! Toma!” to prevent it from being stolen. And people start to sweat: if you have a word like “axle” or “gate” or “meet” you get very, very nervous about an ‘r’ turning up, knowing some bastard’s going to nick your word if they see the ‘r’ before you do. Play it once, and you will see how this game can easily steal hours of your life. Much like blogging, except you have to actually interact with other humans.