Scrabble as a Cooperative Puzzle

 For as long as I can remember, my mother and I have played card games and board games together, and we've always done it wrong.

Q. What happens when you get two highly non-competitive people to play games together?

A. Everybody wins.

Well, actually nobody wins, but we're okay with that.

Take Scrabble, for example. I understand that you are supposed to pay attention to the numbers on the tiles and the scores written in the squares on the board?

Yeah, we don't do that. We just try to get every letter on the board in the most interesting words we can think of. If that means occasionally using a foreign word, onomatopoeia or initialism, so be it. It's not so much a "game" with a "winner" as a cooperative puzzle. Often, by the end of the game, we'll even turn around the last few tiles so we can all see them and work together to finish the board.

For games where the "winner" is the first person to do something ("you've played out all the cards in your hand! You win!") we'll often just pick up another hand of cards or tiles and keep going. There are still pieces left to play - why would you stop just because someone theoretically "won"?

Our least favourite games are the ones where you basically have to stop when someone wins. So boring.

I don't know if we started doing this because my mother wanted to teach me that winning isn't a big deal (and thus I shouldn't be a sore loser), or if it's actually my fault that we do this because I just wanted to keep playing until we ran out of pieces.

Either way, it's a habit we fell into many, many years ago, and it's my preferred way to play games. This makes it very difficult to play with other people. They care about winning and all that crap, which is incredibly dull. I care about whether I can sneakily get three different spellings of a homophone onto the board.

If you've never played Scrabble as a cooperative puzzle, you really should give it ago. When it's a team sport and everyone is on the same team, it really does change the dynamics of the game completely - for the better I think.

But if you're a competitive person, you probably shouldn't try playing a game with me. I'll lose just for fun, which tends to really annoy people who are genuinely trying to win.