A game stub where players compete to come up with words based on car license plates.
Knowing how to quickly anagram a selection of letters is a crucial skill to Scrabble and other word games. An anagram is word that shares the same letters as another word. For example, HEART and EARTH are anagrams, as is HATER. One way to practice this skill is to leverage all the license plates around you any time that you are on the road.
Next time that you see a license plate, start thinking about a work that would use all the letters on it. The order doesn’t necessarily matter, and you will almost certainly need to supply some extra letters to make a real word. That’s okay – the challenge is simply finding a word that uses all the license plate letters as quickly as possible.
Here we go: you are driving home from work, and come to a stop light. The license plate ahead of you is HST-792. THIS, SHUT, and HITSall might come to your mind pretty quickly. Nice work. However, unlike Scrabble, try to get the biggest word that you can that still grabs all those license plate letters. Striving for a word like HEARTHSmakes it that much better when you come up with a killer big word.
To make the challenge even higher, you can require that the letters are used in the order on the license plate. You can still add in extra letters, but the license plate letters must not occur in an order different than how they are presented on the plate. Now our example is a little harder. Maybe WHISTLE comes to mind; good play. However, HUNTRESS is not valid – it is a real word, but the license plate letters of HST come in an order other than H, then S, then T.
If you are playing with someone else, or just like your solo games a little more competitive, use the numbers on the license plate for scoring. The first person to come up with a word gets points equal to the first number on the plate. For a solo game, you get those first points only if you get a satisfactory word in, say, 10 seconds or less. Continuing the example, someone calling out HOSTEL before anyone else presents a valid word would earn 7 points for being first.
The person with the longest valid word gets the second number on the license plate. This gives you a reason to think hard before saying your word. Often that thinking hard will work in direct tension to thinking fast. You’ll have to quickly weight the different point values between first word and longest word in order to determine what the optimal strategy is, all while still furiously anagramming the letters in front of you to come up with good words. The guy who shouts out HYSTERIA would get 9 points in our example for having a longer word than HOSTEL. For a solo rule, you must meet or exceed the point value of second number in order to gain the points – in our example, you’d have to find a 9-letter word to get the 9 bonus points.
Finally, blurting out a word that isn’t actually a word can be penalized by subtracting points equal to the last number on a license plate. You’ll have to settle on what constitutes a word, but the dictionary tool on the Scrabble website is usually a fine place to go. In this case, the unlucky person who goes with HATRACKS loses 2 points, not because it isn’t a word (because it is), but because the license plate letters were not used in the correct order (HTS was not the correct order).