Stealy Anagrams

January 4th, 2015
games
I recently played a game of Anagrams with friends where we got one of the rules slightly wrong. Under normal rules you combine one or more letters from the pool with zero or more letters from other people's words to form a new word, but we were playing that you could form multiple new words. This meant lots of chains like:
  pool: e q a v         pool: q v

  gravel          ->    grave
  tweets                sweet
  charm                 chasm
                        real
The game moved much slower than typical games, with long pauses while people struggled to keep long chains in their heads. I'm not sure I've ever played a game where I felt my working memory was so much the limiting factor. For future play I might add a rule that you couldn't reuse words. Otherwise there's a lot of 'grave' ↔ 'gravel' and 'quit' ↔ 'quite' as people need to find/lose specific letters.

(If professionals were playing this game, each time a new letter came out most of the words would change hands. We weren't that good.)

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

AI incompetence often comes from misalignment

Sometimes I see people say “I’m not worried about AI risk because AIs are really bad at things.” I think this is a misunderstanding.

via Thing of Things April 27, 2026

You should try contra dancing

a story of middle school Ben • a not-very-illuminating description of the mechanics • flow, joy, and community • the antidote to the rest of life • how to try contra

via benkuhn.net April 24, 2026

On AI writing in 2026

I use AI to write a little bit: I ask it for high level feedback on blog post drafts, make mechanical edits, and sometimes use it to brainstorm options for wording at a paragraph level. It’s unusual that I accept its wording or changes without modificatio…

via Home April 16, 2026

more     (via openring)