Some comments about how I constructed my 1202-1202 game: 1. When constructing the game, I didn't think about the plays in order. Instead, I constructed a general layout of where I wanted the bingos to be played, then filled them in one at a time. Obviously, I started with the triple-triples, since they're the most valuable. Then, I worked my way in, until I knew which words should be placed where. 2. I tried to get as much value out of the 3- and 4- point tiles as possible. The most extreme example of this is the W in PREWEIGH and OVERWRITES. Its point value gets multiplied by 4 in REWEIGH, 4 in O(V)ER(W)RITE, 1 in (OVERWRITE)S, and 3 in P(REWEIGH), meaning that in total its point value is multiplied by 12. That means this single W contributed 4x12=48 points to the total. Every 3+ point tile in my construction, except for the B in VOIDABLE, has its point value multiplied by at least 6 in total. 3. In my original layout, the tiles in RoBINIA were instead placed as a double-double to the T in OVERWRITES. This actually fell just short of the 1200 barrier. I spent a while trying to find ways to make a small improvement to the layout, and eventually found RoBINIA, scoring a few more points despite not being a double-double, because of all the overlaps it made. 4. Making the score be a tie was actually easier than I expected. My strategy for this was to swap which player made which plays, until the score was a tie. For example, after the initial play, Mack played INTERWA(R), and then I played AGGADA(H)S. If instead, Mack played AGGADA(H)S first, then I played INTERWA(R), the sum of our scores stays the same, but it's no longer a tie. There's enough freedom in these swaps that you can make pretty much any construction like this into a tie, as long as the sum of scores is even. (If it was odd, I would move the blanks to make the scure sum even.)
Yep, pretty close to what we were doing, only we sprinkled in crazy stuff like the full overlaps for ADEQUACY and several front and back hooks for some extra oomph, in exchange of some less optimal placement of the 3 and 4 pointers. I found it crazy impressive how all of those scoring tiles are perfectly placed in your submission. No funny business, no hooking THIONINE back and front, just sheer perfect placement of all the value tiles. I'm in awe at how you managed to find something that clean.
Nice board. Mine followed the same ideas of maximizing the high-point tiles by first laying the 3x3s. I guess I didn't utilize overlaps enough as those seemed to squeeze out the extra 30-40 points. My board only contained one (!) 2-letter word. I really liked F(RE)QUENCY not only because it's a 9-letter 3x3, but because ONESELF gets to the next 3x3 lane faster. Once I constructed a board, as long as the sum of all scores is even, finding a sequence of plays was pretty easy, probably easier than what you mentioned. Here I simply used a Python script to solve the subset sum problem, by finding a subset of size 6 from 13 bingos whose sum is equal to the tie score minus the 1st player's move. The tricky part was making sure certain plays come after other plays and that each side has at least one possible play.
Thanks so much to all of you guys for sharing your thought processes, really interesting and insightful! When I was initially constructing these I also started with the 3*3s but definitely didn't think about overlaps or maximizing the value of the 3-4 pointers in nearly as much detail as you all did. Was super interesting to see the different types of boards each of you had and just as interesting to see how you arrived at them, so thanks (and congrats) again!
Thanks for the challenge Mack, I had a lot of fun wrecking my brain over this for a month :D And great work to everyone else who submitted, Vincent's board layout is truly stunning! We looked at 9-letter triple triples a bunch and never got close to finding a fit that good. Keep the great content coming!!
Congrats on the win, love the overlaps especially! (Also, I think a Scrabble wizard like yourself should definitely use the (delightfully on-topic) spelling of "racking" for the brain exertion activity 🙂)
I'm new to scrabble, but after watching this video I started an online game and miraculously drew ABOITEAU which I would never have found without this video.
Mack's content is probably most valuable for improving one's strategy and tactics (with the exception of stuff like this, which is pure, awesome entertainment). The secondhand vocab absorption is a real thing though. I learned "UNREPAID" from one of his vids in the Hastybot series, and a few weeks later played it in-person and lucked into a challenge to boot.
A shoutout to pumpjack's cousins, HIGHJACK and FLAPJACK, who were also very popular throughout my attempts (and I'm sure many others'). We actually had a 1208 with HIGHJACK, and the highest score I managed to get solo (before lovemathboy started helping) was an 1180 that also used HIGHJACK.
I loved this challenge! I also definitely did not spend *way* too much time working on this challenge instead of actual work. A few fun facts about our submission (spoilers! obviously): - The game is actually intentionally suboptimal by 1 point. If you play IODISED before GROOVIEST (as well as some turn order tweaking), it results in a 1211-1210 game. - The GROOVIEST play scores so much is also partially due to the word being placed over a DW DL DW lane, with the V on the DL!
This video is great. Those who remember the original Scrabble News got to do a contest similar to this every issue. I remember winning a contest where you got 10 turns. Every turn you played exactly 4 tiles. I scored over 800
Haha don't worry I'm equally guilty of having spent too much time on similar puzzles instead of doing things I probably *should* be doing! So glad you enjoyed it and congrats again on you guys's win!
Amazing! I wonder what the theoretical maximum tie (or total combined score, for that matter) is. On another note, I just played the word DISOBEDIENTLY against someone -- a few turns after bingoing with OBEDIENT! It even hit a double-double for 76 points!
Hi Mack -- I want to once again propose the following variant that I mentioned a few months ago and seemed to get a lot of upvotes at the time. Get your favorite opponent. Share your screen. Open Quackle. Deal both players 50 tiles. Each turn, you play up to seven tiles. All scoring is normal. No issue sharing your screen because the game is perfect-knowledge. For even more strategic fun, you could alternate selecting a tile from the bag to form your initial 50-tile set up front.
Definitely a cool idea. Also, I detect a fellow board gamer (beyond Scrabble here), how you're thinking of the "card drafting" mechanic to select tiles at the beginning. That is actually a pretty cool idea. Obviously the blanks would go first, but after that it would get interesting.
The strategy of using the X Q J Z on the double letters in a triple triple seems quite an obvious starting point, but I wonder if there's a way to somehow get even more points if you don't do that. I guess it would be very hard.
Since every play needs to be a bingo, it would not be feasible to make a triple/triple/triple (x27), since you would need 8 of the 14 turns to set up a 15 letter word, and you would not maximize all triple words. So, putting a power tile on the double letter and making 4 triple/triple seems optimal. The only potentially better way I could see would be if you make a lot of 15 letter word *triple triples. You could make a 15 letter word along the A, H, O column, and the 8 row, with one stray 7 in the middle of the board somewhere to set up the first 15 letter word. That would make 4 triple/triples, with 15 letter words, and all of them hit a double letter score, so, they are just more efficient than a 7 or 8 letter word that does the same. This would take 9 turns. With the remaining 5 turns you can work on optimizing the score to make a tie. Finding 4 15 letter words that have just the right extensions is a challenge I'm not willing to try, but 1300+ is probably possible, if you can manage it.
@@anewfuture We actually looked at this - playing four 15s as triple triples - it turns out that there's really not many options that place JQXZ on the DL spaces, and it turns out that doing that *really* matters. You end up having 15s that don't score nearly as much as you'd expect - because words like HIGHJACK or PUMPJACK are so dense with high scoring tiles, if you add 8 more 1-pointers to make a 15, but lose the 8 points from not placing the J on the DL spot, you can easily end up scoring less.
Humor me for a moment. Where specifically can I download the full list of all words eligible in this contest? I don't need a website, I need a text file of plain (ASCII) text. The most recent thing I have is 20 years old and was called Lexpert or something like that. I need plain text only - just a text file of thousands of words. I'm sure everyone else watching this video already has all the access to Scrabble words that they need, but I have not been a member of any Scrabble organization in a long time, and the closest I am getting to finding access to the official list of words is a web site that wants me to join something and pay a fee to get to the word list.
Fantastic stuff. Posing creative challenges like this for the viewers, and then showcasing the top submissions as you've done here, would be a great idea for a series. Would love to see more stuff like this.
The H in HALLOWER was already there, so you don't get points for HALLOWER! If you'd hooked the H onto ALLOWER (which actually isn't a word, somewhat surprisingly, but by way of example) then you'd be correct
I don't recall you saying what challenge rules were being used for this contest. If it's the 5-point rule, then one could take the above game and precede each turn with five challenged phonies before finally playing the correct word. If I've calculated correctly, that would increase each player's score by 175. If it wasn't for the 6-pass rule, then this same strategy could be expanded to an absurd degree - not quite infinite, but probably into the billions.
It's double -- I figured this was implied when I mentioned NWL word list (since NWL is always played with double challenge in tournaments), but I probably could've been more clear, apologies!
With the restriction of only using bingoes, I have to wonder if it is possible to play four sevenfold overlaps to place letters in rows 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14 on each column, allowing for bingoes with 27x word score
Yeah it could only be done once as you said, but still an interesting question to think about (especially if you were trying to do a one-player max score challenge)!
@@mackmeller One challenge I've been wondering about is to play a 1000 point move with a randomly and spontaneously drawn sequence of tiles. You'd probably want to fish for one of the 15s ending in "zing", heard there's like 80 of them
Super fun idea. I'm glad to see participation was incredible which means more videos like this in the future. I know woogles has a board editor but you need to sign up to use it. Is there any other easy access with built in dictionary board editors?
I saw that but wondered if there were any better tools others use. (I couldn't find a scoring option playere turns etc and more user friendly to work with. I'm still yet to try woogles but I assume by Mack's videos is probably the best thing to use.
I'm not familiar with other options but I'd strongly recommend using the Woogles one -- it's free to sign up (in case you weren't already aware) and there's lots of other fun stuff to do on the site!
I have no problem with signing up I just was wondering what was out there, it's only been a short time since I've starting watching all this scrabble content. I skimmed your series on where to start scrabble and downloaded zyzzyva and went through all the effort to try get that working and then stumbled across aerolith and was like I'm dumb why didn't I just do this in the first place it's 10 times easier so thought I would ask Incase there was a preferred website I didn't know about. Thanks for the reply as usual
This sounds kind of stupid, but what if you did this but one opponent scores as high as possible and the other scores as low as possible. Keep the all bingos restraint to make sure the low scorer doesn't just play a bunch of 2 letter words or outright skip their turn with a pass or exchange.
@@AmaranthRBY Hmm, how would you set that up though if every play still has to be a bingo? You'd need like HEN, UTA, ON all separated, so with no non-bingos allowed that's 8 bingos right there which have to overlap in 2 sets of 3 and 1 set of 2. And you only get 14 bingos in total (one of which will be OXYPHENBUTAZONE, and you'll need at least a couple to start to approach a side of the board), so seems tough. I'd love to be proven wrong though!
@@mackmeller to minimize the need for perfectly overlapping bingos while still leaving the bonus tiles, it suffices to setup only XY,H,N,U,A,ON leaving the next player with adding O,P,E,B,T,Z,E.
@@mackmeller Yeah it could end up being barely not feasible. I already briefly looked at setting up specific 3-way overlaps like that for this challenge, in an attempt to set up SCY(PHO)ZOAN 3x3 through PHO, and could only barely make it work with BAASKAAP / UNHEALTH / SESTETTO (making BUS / ANE / AHS / SET / KAE / ALT / ATT / PHO) -- but that had the problem of consuming a very valuable K in a very low scoring spot, so I didn't look further into it. (edit: it also had the problem of SESTETTO#, which I'm only now noticing) My guess would still be that it's at least possible to set up a x27 - I'll give it a shot if I'm bored today
*Read before watching, no spoilers*: For those interested, very fun / rewarding to pause the video throughout and see if you can come up with the solutions.
