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.)

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