IF ONLY
Requirements: 1 Standard Scrabble set
I am sure you know that familiar emotion when looking at your rack – six lovely
letters and one to spoil the rack. If only that other letter was….I am sure you get the picture.
The game of ‘If Only’ is played as standard Scrabble except that you may turn one of your
letters over and call it a blank as long as the move you make with it scores 50 or more points.
At any time in your go you may also swap a ‘turned over’ letter on the board with the real letter
from your rack – you can only do this once in your move.
As you can imagine, point scoring can be phenomenal. A game of ‘If Only’
once played between Mike O'Rourke and another player consisted of 14 straight bonus plays.
A certain amount of strategy can also creep into the game. For instance, the normal blanks
can be used as blanks so in theory you could have up to three blanks in a word – including a
turned over letter. Alternatively, you could turn a blank or an S over as another letter and know
that you can recover these later if you pick up the right letter to replace them.
‘If Only’ is a wonderful game for brushing up on those seven letter (bonus) words.
The scores in this games were 637 to Nuala O'Rourke, 741 to Karen Richards (who had both the 9ers, and Nuala blocked a third) Combined score of 1378. (This may be a record score for an If Only game, but records are patchy at best).
