The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader.
Playing board games like Scrabble or Risk against a skilled player can be aggravating. Here are a few devious tactics and tips that may help you win (almost) every time.
MONOPOLY
Tournament players often employ an aggressive strategy at the beginning of their matches. They purchase every property they land on. Then, after a little wheeling and dealing with other players to obtain all the properties of a single color, they start placing houses on their squares. (The cheaper ones first, because funds are typically low early in the game.)
Opinions vary on which properties are landed on the most often, but many swear it’s the orange ones. Buying as many of those as possible should be considered a priority, because the more property you own there, the more you get to collect in rent from the other players. Late in the game, it pays to stay in jail for as long as possible. That way you can collect rent on your properties while you remain safely behind bars, away from your opponents’ rent-earning properties.
BATTLESHIP
(Image credit: Flickr user Andrew Malone)
When setting up your ships at the beginning of the game, it helps to place smaller vessels alongside or beneath larger ones. You should also put at least one ship on the edge of your board, since most players tend to aim for the middle. Another tip: never fire another peg within one space of a miss. This will help reduce your need to randomly guess where your opponent’s ships are hiding by at least half. There’s also the “checkerboard method,” which involves imagining the board with alternating black-and-white squares and firing only on the black ones. Then, once you score a hit, you should fire pegs adjacently until you sink your opponent’s boat.
THE GAME OF LIFE
(Image credit: 松岡明芳)
At the beginning of the game, you should probably go to college. This will help you get a better job and earn a higher salary, although doing so might not help if you don’t land on enough “Pay Day” squares later on. Auto and home insurance can come in handy, but unless you’re really unlucky, you’ll be throwing away your hard-earned play money. Instead, invest in stocks. If you land on a “Lucky Day” square, you should always gamble instead of keeping the initial jackpot— the chances of winning are around 5 to 1.
SCRABBLE
(Image credit: The NeatoShop)
You don’t need a huge vocabulary to win at Scrabble, but it does help to know a lot of the obscure, two-letter words to use late in the game where there isn’t a lot of space available for longer words. First, there’s “za.” Definition: “pizza.” “Qi” is another simple but powerful word. (It means “life force.”) And don’t be afraid to swap out all your letters if you wind up with a tray full of lousy ones. Yes, you lose a turn, but it will likely aid you in the long run. Another key tactic: play defensively. Don’t create words that will allow your opponents to capitalize on the triple-letter or triple-word squares. Oh, and there’s one more word you should memorize: “oxyphenbutazone.” It’s an anti-inflammatory drug, and, theoretically, the highest-scoring word possible in Scrabble. It could earn as many as 1,778 points.
RISK
(Image credit: Jorge Royan)
Since the late 1950s, the “Game of Global Domination” has brought out the power-hungry dictator in millions. If full-scale warfare isn’t your forte, follow these tips the next time you play, and end the game quickly. At the game’s outset, focus on taking over every territory in Australia and South America— two remote continents that are easy to defend— as quickly as possible. This will earn you some “continent bonuses” that will significantly boost the number of armies at your disposal. Then allow several turns to pass while your opponents attack each other.
Once your forces grow big enough, launch your own invasions. It goes without saying that when you attack a territory, do so with as many armies as possible. Why? Because if you win the battle with just a few armies, you probably won’t have enough left to protect the territory you invaded. Also, learn a lesson from Napoleon: don’t attempt to invade both Europe and Asia at the same time.
_______________________________
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader. The latest annual edition of Uncle John’s wildly successful series features fascinating history, silly science, and obscure origins, plus fads, blunders, wordplay, quotes, and a few surprises
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
Comments (6)
Also, glue a word to another word.
Then go find Acquire (boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5) if you like the property collection.
or I'm the Boss (boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/115) if you like the wheeling and dealing.
Interestingly, both games were created, decades apart, by the late great Sid Sackson.
And, while Scrabble is ok, needing knowledge of arcane two-letter words to win is a drawback. What has Sid Sackson got for us? Buyword (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8920/buyword). Plays 1-4 players in less than an hour. Almost no downtime as all players play somewhat simultaneously. The man was a genius.
this is only an example, it gets more complicated than that.
I think the only reason it's easier than Arabic is that we like to make words up as we go along.
but for some reason, I almost always know what my russian buddies are talking about. it's weird. i feel like the equivalent of an intelligent dog.
je parle en peu de francais, but it's been a long itme.
That's not different from Portuguese (and perhaps Spanish and other latin languages) at all. To me the worst part of learning Arab would be to learn how to read all over again. And backwards.
keyword: planning.
:S
partially because there is never a need to speak it
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
my favorite latin palindrome ^^^
i haven't taken a latin class in 5 years
@ Kaviani: I'm a native-English speaker and found Japanese to be relatively easy. I've also heard that it is one of the easiest languages to learn for foreign speakers.
Aside from its well-known difficulties (e.g., 3 scripts), Japanese often omits the subject of a sentence, and has different levels of speech depending on one's social status relative to one's interlocutor.
Also, the 6,900+ figure is for languages AND dialetcts.
Nice people but their politics are a little confused.
ps: they make nice beer.
Chinese and Arabic are equally difficult but in different ways. Chinese isn't terribly hard to pick up but it gets a lot harder as you progress.
Arabic is difficult in the beginning but afterward you start to get a feel for things--it's a consistent system unlike English.
It's impossible! By law, all Irish children spend a massive 12 years learning this impossible language and a bare handfull can speak it fluently when they leave school.
What to know some of its'f madness? Ok, in Irish, we add letters called séimhiú and urú http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_initial_mutations . Basically these are added to words to make them easier to say, so if I wanted to say, pen I would say "peann". If I wanted to say my pen, I would say "mo pheann" and if I wanted to say your en it would be "bhur bpeann".
Hard enough yet? Well the letter you put it changes according to personal pronouns and other things, but it also changes according to the first letter of the word. So we had "bpeann" for pen, but what about horse or "capall"? Well in that instance it's still "mo chapall" for my horse, but now it's "bhur gcapall" for their horse.
And if you wonder why some Irish people can't just say yes or no to a question, that's because Irish has no yes and no words! We just use the negative & positive of the verb in question, so if someone askes "An bhfuil sé ag cur baiste? is it raining? you say Sea, or Ni shea (it is or it isn't)
And that's before we get into the weird tenses, the exceptions to the rules (more exceptions than rules to be frank)the regional dialects, the pronunciation, the bonkers spelling, etc etc etc! Still, it's a great language!^_^ Anyway, here's a pretty old irish langauge film - I picked it because it'd give you a fairly accurate version of Irish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxFpWRNhySI
My persian is at a 6th grade level. I've got a thing for languages. I started arabic it was too hard so I started japanese as well which by comparison is really not bad at all!
Can I just add, that grammatical arabic is a beast unlike any other, that I have seen.
The base form of any word has a total of 14 conjugations. Then, there are 14 forms, for each, past, present, future, negative, command... and the list goes on. anything you want to say, has 14 conjugations.
Then to add to it, the rules have variety depending on the letters you use. So the size and scale of the rules exponentially increases! Then, as the article mentions is the passive tone which has a completely different set of rules.
What's worse is that conversationally mispronunciation can completely change the gist of what you want to say. Oh and dialects between countries, are so extreme that they can be incomprehensible.
:-(