tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 02 02:10:55 1994

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Re: Scrabble anyone?



According to David E G Sturm:
> 
> 
> On Sun, 31 Jul 1994, William H. Martin wrote:
> > According to David E G Sturm:
> > > On Sun, 31 Jul 1994, David E G Sturm wrote:
> > > > 2.  Branching will be very difficult with unmodified Klingon word length 
> > > > barely above 3.  I'm not exactly sure how one would get around this.  
> > > Neither am I, since I meant to write:
> > >  "*average* unmodified Klingon word length"
> > moHaqmeyna'majvam mojaqmeyna'majvam je
> > Dalo'qangchoHlaHbejtaHneSchugh, vaj bISovchoHba'.
> 
> Cute, but notice I said *unmodified*.  

Note that what I said means "Your honor, if you were willing to
change to be able to definitely continue to use these, our real
prefixes and suffixes, then you would obviously begin to know
[how you would get around an average word length of 3
characters]." If you allowed words to be modified, then the
game would have many opportunities to modify words already on
the board. This would make the game quite interesting.

> The game of Scrabble becomes 
> extremely challenging in a language that has a ubiquitous CVC pattern.  
> Try playing it in Chinese (Pinyin, of course) or Vietnamese (vowel marks 
> are omitted).  Certainly long combinations exists in those languages too, 
> but the *odds* of having exactly the right tiles are low enough to make 
> it a small problem.  Let's presume we start a game of Klingon Scrabble, 
> and see how it goes....  (Shall we call it pIqaD'a'mey zha?)
> 
> Using my pseudorandom generator, here are your tiles charghwI':
> [ch] [a] ['] ['] [m] [e] [D]
> We can start with standard rules....  Your move......   :-)

Dache'. Five letters. If "m" was worth more, then chema'. Or
maybe mech'a'? That's six letters. Okay, lacking a rating on
characters, I pick mech'a'. Your move.

> David E G Sturm

charghwI'



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