A few years back I was at an auction where a prepper had passed away. He had everything under the sun and appeared to be well stocked in the food department as well as many other areas. While looking over everything before the auction started, I noticed a Scrabble board game. I thought to myself, “Now here’s a guy who was really prepared for TEOTWAWKI.”
It wasn’t the cheapie set with the board that folds in half and no bag to draw your tiles from. It was one of the deluxe editions with a swivel base which allows each player to rotate the board toward them when it’s their turn. The board has inset squares to hold the tiles so they don’t move if the board is bumped. It was an exquisite find. It sells new for $169 and I was pretty tickled when I was the only bidder. I got it for $2.50. It was exactly like the one I already have, and since two is one and one is none, I’m good to go if the SHTF any time soon. It’s important to have your priorities straight.
While cutting firewood recently and thinking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I realized there are a lot of prepping lessons one can learn from Scrabble. I thought I’d share some of those.
WHAT IS SCRABBLE?
One third of American and British homes have a Scrabble set. For those who aren’t familiar with Scrabble, or for those who think it’s just a cheesy crossword-puzzle game, let me explain briefly what it is and why it’s closer to chess than it is to Chutes ‘n Ladders.
Scrabble is defined as “a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.” Each tile also has a small number indicating how much that letter is worth when scoring a word. Common letters like A, E, N, R, and T are worth one point. Uncommon letters like Q and Z are worth 10 points. Other letters are worth 2, 4, 5, or 8 points depending on how common they are in English words.
Each word is scored based on which squares it lands on when placed on the board. These squares include double and triple letter scores, and double and triple word scores. When all 7 tiles in your rack are played at once, it’s called a bingo and 50 bonus points are awarded. To obtain a really high game score, expert Scrabble players try to get as many bingos as possible.
When all is said and done, in order to excel at Scrabble you have to realize it’s as much a math game as it is a word game.
To play Scrabble, you draw seven tiles and put them into a small rack so your opponent can’t see what you have. You move the letters around in your rack hoping to find a word that will score as many points as possible. If your word passes though a double or triple word square, it allows you to double or triple the points the word adds up to. There are also double and triple letter squares. The best scores are when you have a high-point letter which lands on a triple letter score, then the word lands on a double word score. This allows you first double the letter before doubling the entire word. For example, the word QUIET is worth 14 points as a stand alone. If the Q (worth 10 points) lands on a double letter score, then the word is worth 24 points. If the Q lands on the double letter score, then the word hits a double word score, the 24-point word becomes a 48 point word. If instead of QUIET, QUIETER is played, using all seven tiles in one turn gives you an extra 50-point bonus. Therefore, with the two extra letters added and the extra 50 points, the play then scores 102 points. By using the right strategy, a 14-point word gets turned into a 102-point word. For that reason, I consider Scrabble to be a math game disguised as a spelling game. By using this strategy, I once changed a 20-point word, DEWAXING into a 275-point word. (For Scrabble aficionados, it was a triple-triple bingo with the X landing on the double-letter score. There was one blank tile.)
There are many prepping lessons which can be drawn from Scrabble, namely that it involves the same planning, troubleshooting ability, foresight, understanding of probabilities, and knowing when to lose a turn when it’s necessary to get rid of bad tiles to exchange them for something better. And like Scrabble, with prepping there’s not much luck involved.
LOOKING AHEAD
The single-most important rule to follow to become a professional Scrabble player is this: what you keep in your rack is just as important as what you play on the board. This rule more than any other determines how high your final score will be. Ignoring this rule eliminates the possibility of ever becoming an expert at Scrabble. You must look ahead to your next turn and decide which tiles in your rack are the most likely to help you get a bingo on your next play. With the most important letters such as E, I, N, O, R, S, and T, called bingo-stem letters, the value of keeping them in your rack needs to be weighed against how much they will affect the points you can make if played on the current turn.
In the same way, the whole idea behind prepping is to look ahead and plan for as many of the possibilities as we can. We have to keep as many of the essentials on hand as possible if we want to increase our chances of surviving a serious world-changing event. If we don’t think we have enough money to properly prepare, we have to weigh the value of our current lifestyle against perhaps diverting some of the money we use to support that lifestyle to buying preps instead.
Novice players think Scrabble is a game of luck. Realizing that what you keep in your rack is as important as what you play on the board takes 90% of the luck out of the game. We increase the chances of winning when we look at the big picture and prepare for our next play instead of just the current one.
Likewise, with surviving a TEOTWAWKI event, prepping takes 90% of the luck out of the equation. A few SurvivalBlog readers reported some of their friends and neighbors asking for food within just a few days of some of the 2024 hurricane disasters. It wasn’t unlucky they ran out of food, they just hadn’t looked far enough ahead to prepare for bad weather. Even as the storm was approaching landfall and warnings were issued days ahead of time, many people still failed to do even the most basic prepping like stocking up on enough food for a few weeks. It was bad luck the hurricanes hit, but not bad luck people weren’t as prepared as they should have been.
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE VS SITUATIONAL OPERATING PROCEDURE
Standard operating procedure for Scrabble is that during a player’s turn, they can only use the seven tiles in their rack to form words. One of the alternate rules states that during their turn, a player may exchange one of the tiles in their rack with a tile drawn from the bag, or with a tile already on the board as long as the exchanged tile still makes a word. For example, if the word DEMOTING is on the board, a player can exchange the V in his rack for the M in demoting. The new word on the board becomes DEVOTING and the player adds the M tile to their rack.
With prepping, as with many aspects of life, we don’t want to get stuck in a standard operating procedure mindset when putting our preps together. Oftentimes we need to tweak things for our particular situation and use situational operating procedure as long as it still gets the job done.
When prepping for TEOTWAWKI we have to plan on living in a rural area with our own well, or less desirably, a nearby water source. For most of us in rural areas, our current standard operating procedure for water is to use a 220-volt deep-well pump and a 120-volt pressure pump and tank to supply water to our faucets. For a post-SHTF life, we have to switch to situational operating procedure if there’s no longer a grid to supply the electricity to run our well and pressure pumps.
The situational operating procedure is more complicated than you’d think when it comes to water wells. One option could include a solar-panel-powered well pump, a water storage tank, and a 12-volt battery-powered RV water pump. When we understand how home water systems work, we see that a water tank becomes a necessity if we wish to continue with our water system as it is currently. Standard operating procedure fails when the grid fails so when it comes to water, our preps must include a situational operating procedure.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)
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